Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, 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 website or blog, all you have to do to generate more web traffic is post new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped 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 website, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive visitors automatically to your website or blog whenever you begin posting fresh content regularly.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself spending a couple of hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you were to spend all of your time posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using social media 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 probably 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.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of so many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 that you stay away from all black hat websites, methods, software, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and 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 in the previous section that many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels is very 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 services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels 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 described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other websites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, 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 Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in your Publish box.)
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 posts are automatically distributed online.)
Visit this website to learn more about this handy plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your visitors interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for sharing content, adding twitter usernames to comments, and using keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit this site:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to over 30 authority platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 social sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
For more details about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here for more information:
The above are just a few 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 Automation Blueprint: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you then have to do is publish fresh content regularly to automatically attract new traffic.
If you need great ideas for posting content on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
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 our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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