Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to drive traffic is post fresh content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help get traffic automatically to your website.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours or more every day 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 online marketing experts are recommending. If you were to spend half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per 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 done today, the figures would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another 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 have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time is not 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 budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, time, and budget 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 staying away from all black hat sites, techniques, tools, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is 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 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 how many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving method 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 media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online 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 WordPress website as shown in Part Two. 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 Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 loads of great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displays in your publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit this website: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that lets your visitors engage with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the username, social enticements for sharing content, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you drip-feed your content to many social websites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 online platforms, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit this website for more information about this handy 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 efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
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 System: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add content regularly to automatically start driving web traffic organically.
If you need endless content ideas for your site, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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