Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is add content on a consistent basis to begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help bring traffic automatically to your website or blog as you begin to add new content.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which business marketing expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day posting content on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you were to spend all of your time checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would most likely be 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.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image 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 leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in business automation to leverage 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 availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online 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 marketing channels do you focus more 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, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your 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 tools, techniques, sites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving 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,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 described in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate these processes 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 look now at a number of plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options show in your Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your site users interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing your content, adding twitter usernames to comments, using keywords in the name, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that lets you drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of social platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more details about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article on social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more about this:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you have to do then is add web content on a consistent basis to automatically start attracting web traffic organically.
If you need great content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing 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 the process. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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