Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic generation machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish new content regularly to begin bringing traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase. We help 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 existing site is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate your traffic using plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time just 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 grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six 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 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As 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 resources, time, and budgets and many 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 a number of 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 LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 invest more of your budget, time, and your efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, software, sites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the content distribution using plugins such as the ones shown in the next section.
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 brief look at some plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, 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 loads of great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(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 automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content 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 settings in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your site users interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of authority sites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 social platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about using this plugin, visit the plugin site: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), or to learn more about social media tracking 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 affect your business,etc, see this article:
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 System: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then is post content consistently to automatically generate more web traffic.
We have created a complete email series aimed at helping you come up with limitless content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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