Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive 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 or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin attracting traffic is add great content consistently!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, we discuss ways to automate traffic to your website using plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day posting content on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget 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 are spending hours checking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many 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 make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using 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 research was done today, the numbers would probably be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small 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 are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth 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 time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget 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 the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your 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-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat techniques, tools, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels individually, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels 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 services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and web 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 WordPress website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a number of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, 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 many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details in your post publishing box.)
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 new posts are published, they will be automatically syndicated online.)
Visit the plugin site for more information about using this handy plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting function allows your site users to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, tweet, or like your post. 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 with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 online sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many traffic-generating sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about using this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), or to learn more about social media tracking tools that you may want to check out, refer to this article:
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 System: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and set up, all you have to do to automatically generate web traffic is add fresh content on a regular basis.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content for 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 WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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