Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is add fresh content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of this blueprint. We explained 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we will look at ways to automate traffic generation using plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could end up spending an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you are spending half your day posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the figures would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you invest more of your time, budget, and efforts 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 share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more budget, time, and efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat techniques, software, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited 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, most business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as shown in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate various processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some traffic-generating plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other websites via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social networks.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the publishing 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 distributed online.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your visitors engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for content sharing, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, ability to use keywords in the user name, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content automatically to over 30 authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article listing many social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here for more details:
The above are just a few 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 System: Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish great content consistently to attract web traffic.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you come up with endless content ideas for posting to your web site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 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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