Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish web content regularly to begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help get visitors automatically to your website.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which business marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would probably be higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budget and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can make decisions that affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated traffic solutions tend to focus on black hat methods, such as manipulating search engine results. This is not what the focus of this article series is about. In fact, we recommend avoiding black hat software, websites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this strategy instead …
(Set up an automated content distribution, lead and traffic generation, and sales and marketing system with WordPress)
With an expertly configured WordPress site, you can build more than just a website for your business … you can set up an automated traffic and lead generation and sales & marketing system, where all you do is publish your content and WordPress then automates the rest.
With WordPress, you can publish content once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Import content automatically (e.g. videos)
As your business evolves, you can add more functionality and automate processes like:
- Sell products and services with e-commerce,
- Capture leads with opt-in forms and add your subscribers to newsletters and autoresponders,
- Allow visitors to register on your site with different membership levels,
- And so much more!
You can do all of this using inexpensive WordPress plugins. Once these plugins are installed and configured on your site, just direct your visitors to the appropriate sections (e.g. your store, subscription forms, membership area, etc.)
How do you do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social media networks.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this great plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about using this powerful plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social websites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about using this great plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. To learn more, go here:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
Kickstart Your WordPress Traffic System
After your traffic automation system has been set up, we recommend kickstarting the process of driving traffic to your site with the steps shown in this tutorial:
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and configured, all you need to do then is publish content on a consistent basis to start generating traffic organically.
If you need endless topics for content that you can post on your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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