Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish fresh content regularly to automatically drive more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained 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 website, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we explain how to set up various plugins that can get web traffic automatically to your site.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which expert you talk to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent half a day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the figures would most likely be higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing 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 time, resources, and marketing budget and many different 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 social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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, methods, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of using this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and web 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, configure everything as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones discussed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social media networks.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings show in the Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure for your content online on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting system allows your visitors to engage with your website, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party commenting plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to drip-feed content to over 30 online websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of online platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this handy 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 marketing campaigns), we have created a detailed article listing a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc. More information:
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 Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then have to do is add content on a regular basis to begin bringing traffic organically.
We have created a complete email email-based training course aimed at helping you never run out of great content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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