Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase of this process. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, we look at ways to automate the traffic system with different WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you were to spend half a day checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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 make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 research was done today, the numbers would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budgets 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 marketing and promoting your business on a number of social sites, 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 companies can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more time, efforts, and budget 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 your own website?
- 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 strategy for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and 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 methods, solutions, websites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many small business owners lack the time, human 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 choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels 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 WordPress site as shown in Part Two. Then, configure things as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with 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 Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, 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 functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content on various social media accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options appear in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post will be automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting system allows your visitors to engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or plus1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
For more information about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that lets you drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of authority websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore over 30 social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about. More information:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing the distribution of your content online.
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 Phase – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you need to do then to start generating traffic is post fresh content regularly.
We have created an entire email training series designed to help you come up with limitless content ideas for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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