Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive traffic automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to generate more traffic is post web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation blueprint. We helped 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 website, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing experts you talk to, you could end up spending 1-2 hours or more every day posting content on social media.
Many business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spent all of your time checking LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more 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 survey was done 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.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing 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 time, budgets, and resources and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- 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 we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and time 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 recommend avoiding black hat software, techniques, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of 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 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, many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to different channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and web 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part Two. Then, configure everything as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins such as the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social accounts.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displayed in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that allows your blog readers to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many traffic-generating sites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore over 30 social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. See this page to learn more:
The above are just a few 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 System: Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been set up and configured, all you then need to do to automatically generate more traffic is post content regularly.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you never run out of great content for posting to your website:
Once you have 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 Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, 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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