Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish web content on a consistent basis to drive more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get new visitors automatically to your website.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour or more a day promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you are spending hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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 conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (most of the other 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 research was conducted today, the figures would most likely be higher.
- More than half of all small 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.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many different 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 social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- 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 method for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, efforts, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat tools, websites, techniques, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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 business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins such as the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generating plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
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 many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on various social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displayed in your Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your site users engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread 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 social enticements for content-sharing, adding twitter names to comments, using keywords in the user name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Go here for more details about using this powerful plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of social sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here for more information:
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: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins configured and set up, all you need to do then is publish fresh content on a regular basis to drive more web traffic.
We have created a complete email course designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for your web site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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