Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explain 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 post new content consistently to generate web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we discuss ways to automate the traffic system with different WordPress plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending a couple of hours each day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you are spending hours posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more 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 survey was done today, the figures would probably 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more of your efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other companies (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- 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 share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat strategies, sites, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to each different marketing channel, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving method 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on various social media networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displayed in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically syndicated online.)
This is a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure for your content online on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your blog readers interact with your website, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they +1, tweet, or like your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many social websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many online platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Go here for more details about the benefits of this great 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 distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article where we explore many social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. More info:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is post fresh content consistently to drive more traffic organically.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content ideas for your site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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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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