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 series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to attract traffic is post new content consistently!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help get traffic automatically to your website whenever you begin to post web content on a consistent basis.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which online marketing experts you talk to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two per day (or more) posting content on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human 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 advise. If you were to spend half a day checking LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time 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 done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each 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 conducted today, the figures would probably 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time 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 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 LinkedIn. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more of your 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, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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 Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your web traffic generation 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat sites, techniques, software, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Pinterest, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is 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 increase your exposure online to sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to different services individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy like 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as explained in Part 2. Then, configure everything as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the process with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(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 Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content on several social networks.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in your Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new content is automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your visitors engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like using keywords in the username, SEO backlinks, social enticements for sharing content, and the ability to add twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of authority sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this site for more details about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 System: Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been configured and set up, all you then have to do to generate more traffic is post web content on a consistent basis.
If you need help coming up with topics for content that you can post on your website, then subscribe to our email training series 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 Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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