Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, 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 web site, all you have to do is publish web content consistently to begin attracting more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase of the blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various plugins that can bring new visitors automatically to your website.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many small business owners 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 online marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the rest 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 figures would most likely be 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 spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budget and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula 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 and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your time, budget, and 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 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 sites, tools, methods, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to individual channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one by one is extremely 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish new content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected 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 Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social sites.)
After all 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 account details displays in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like adding twitter usernames to comments, using keywords in the username, SEO backlinks, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit this site to learn more about this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to many traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 online sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, visit this website: Social LinkMachine
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), we have written a detailed article listing over 30 social media monitoring tools that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc. Go here for more information:
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 System: Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically generate traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
We have created a complete email email-based training course designed to help you never run out of content for your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click here:
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