Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically bring more traffic is publish new content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained 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 website, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we look at ways to automate traffic generation using a number of plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could end up spending an hour or two per day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent hours checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping 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.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be even 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, time, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business systems and processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more of your 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, 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 The Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time and 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 websites, solutions, techniques, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to each different service, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this approach 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 channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web 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 site as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins such as the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack WordPress 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 WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media sites.)
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 account settings in your Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your visitors to engage with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
Go here for more details about the benefits of this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to many authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of online platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin website for more information about the benefits of this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc. See this page for more information:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do to drive traffic is add great content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, then subscribe to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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