Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we describe the traffic automation process, and 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 is add content consistently to drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of this system. We help 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 is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of this process.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we look at ways to automate traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on who you talk to, you could end up spending an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media while also trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you spend hours checking LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 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 conducted today, the numbers would most likely 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.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have little to no control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and your 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat methods, sites, software, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is 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 that many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 your content distribution 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 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 website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the 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 plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings appear in your Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically shared online.)
Visit the plugin site for more details about the benefits of this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your blog readers engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this powerful plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed content to over 30 authority platforms, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 social websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many authority platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore several social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some 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: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins configured and set up, all you need to do to begin attracting traffic is post great content regularly.
We have created an entire email training series designed to help you never run out of great 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 explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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