Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we provide an overview of 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 site, all you have to do to begin attracting new traffic is add great content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on configuring the system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, we discuss ways to automate traffic generation with different plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more a day posting content on social media while also managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Many business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you spend hours checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 most likely 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic generation 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat techniques, sites, tools, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one can be 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as shown in Part Two. Then, configure it as described in Part 3. After all 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 Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 many great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social media sites.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displays in your publishing box.)
Now, as soon as 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.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your blog readers interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to many traffic-generating platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing many social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. For more details, go here:
The above are just some 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 Blueprint: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is publish new content on a consistent basis to automatically bring more web traffic.
We have created an entire email course aimed at helping you come up with limitless content for your web site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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