Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website 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 site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to attract web traffic is add new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we will look at ways to automate the traffic-generation process using a number of WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which online marketing guru you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.
Many small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you are spending half your day checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each 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 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget 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 various social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior notification. 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 real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since 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, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which of these channels should 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. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- 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 method for automating the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your 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 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 tools, techniques, sites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to manipulate web services or flaunt their terms of service, but 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 increase your exposure online to 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 businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one can be extremely 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
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
- 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content on various social media networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in the Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature allows your visitors to interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help 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 site while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 social sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article listing many social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out. For more information, go here:
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 System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you have to do is add web content on a consistent basis to drive web traffic organically.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our FREE 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 addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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