Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your website into an automated web traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add content on a regular basis to automatically start generating more traffic!)
In Part 2, we look at critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to get started 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 site is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various plugins that can drive new traffic automatically to your site.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour each day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the rest 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 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in business automation to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do 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. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more budget, efforts, and your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat methods, sites, software, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article series is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites 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, many small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generating plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish new content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically to several social networks.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this handy plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they +1, tweet, or like your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content to over 30 online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about. See this page to learn more:
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: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically generate web traffic is post great content on a regular basis.
We have created an entire email course 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 the process. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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