Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin bringing new web traffic is add content consistently!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped 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 website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on who you listen to, you could end up investing an hour or two every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you are spending hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales 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 businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per 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 survey was conducted today, the figures would most likely be even 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, 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 and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budgets. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (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 market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and time 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 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 strongly recommend staying away from all black hat sites, tools, strategies, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to manipulate web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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
We’ve just seen that most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving strategy 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online 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 website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get it configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other blogs via RSS feeds
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social media accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options appear in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
For more details about using this plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to many online platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to many online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 social platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here for more details about the benefits of this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. To learn more, go here:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically begin attracting new traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
If you need help coming up with great ideas for content that you can post on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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