Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post fresh content regularly to bring web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can bring new traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more each day posting content on social media.
Most business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent most of your time checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would most likely 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Investing in business automation to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. Facebook, 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 include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated web 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 strongly urge that you stay away from all black hat sites, techniques, solutions, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to each different channel, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving method 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Automatically import content (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 explained in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social networks.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting feature lets your visitors engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about using this powerful plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to many online sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 social platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a detailed article listing many social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. More info:
The above are just a few 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 Blueprint: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you need to do then to automatically begin attracting new web traffic is add fresh content on a consistent basis.
If you need endless ideas for content that you can post on your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading this article, 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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