Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
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 generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically attract new traffic is publish web content consistently!)
In Part Two, we focus on 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 was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-getting process using various plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you listen to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spent hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours 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 grow in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per 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 survey was conducted today, the figures would probably 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more of your budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to 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 costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset 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 recommend staying away from all black hat tools, sites, strategies, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to each different service, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time is extremely 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as described in Part Two. Then, configure things as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones shown 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 look now at a number of traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack 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, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on several social media sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details in the Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post will be automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your site users to interact with your site, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a number of 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 social platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
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 listing many social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. For more details, 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 Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins fully set up and configured, all you need to do then is add fresh content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting more web traffic organically.
If you need great content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
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