Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing more traffic!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain the best way to start 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 website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase of this system.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings 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 help get new traffic automatically to your website.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself investing 1-2 hours per day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spent hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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 conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half 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 done today, the numbers 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 spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important 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 requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you invest more budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat tools, websites, methods, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game 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 in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites visited 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 many small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different services individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other websites via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displayed in your publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically distributed online.)
Go here for more details about this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function allows your blog readers to engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site 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 type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to drip-feed content to over 30 social sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to many authority websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore many social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out. See this page for more information:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do then is publish great content regularly to begin bringing more web traffic organically.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with limitless content for posting to your site:
Once you have expertly 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 article in our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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