Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically bring traffic is publish great content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of this system.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can get new traffic automatically to your site as you begin posting new content regularly.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours every day (or more) posting content on social media, as well as trying to run your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent most of your time posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per week on social media (the other half 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 conducted today, the figures would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create 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 each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social websites, 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 can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity 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 increased availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting 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 The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your 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 marketing channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat sites, strategies, tools, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to each different marketing channel, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is extremely 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web 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 Two. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other sites via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 many useful features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displays in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that allows your site users to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like SEO backlinks, social enticements for sharing content, adding twitter handles to comments, and using keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin website for more details about the benefits of this powerful plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to many traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many social websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article listing a number of social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc. See this page to learn more:
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 Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is add great content on a regular basis to drive more web traffic organically.
If you need endless topics for posting content on your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To continue reading this article, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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