Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish new content on a regular basis to begin attracting traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using a number of WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you were to spend most of your time posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (the other half 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 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.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budgets, and time and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These companies can make decisions that affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more budget, time, and your 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 ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
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 allows you to automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your 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 you to avoid using black hat software, strategies, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing 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 how many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part Three. After all 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 Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a number of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack 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 Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various social media networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your visitors interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the user name, backlinks, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about the benefits of this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many authority platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here for more information about this powerful plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc. More info:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is add new content on a consistent basis to automatically attract new web traffic.
We have created a complete email training series designed to help you never run out of content ideas for your site:
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 article in the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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