Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of 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 is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to attract more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help bring web traffic automatically to your site.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which business marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending a couple of hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day checking Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small 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 was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind 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 don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity 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 increasing availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more of your efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on 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 With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more budget, efforts, and your 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 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 that you stay away from all black hat methods, solutions, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to individual marketing channels, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this approach 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:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins like the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts to various social sites.)
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 settings in the publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to engage with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing content, search-indexable backlinks, using keywords in the username, and the ability to add twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this handy plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), go here to learn about social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about:
The above are just some 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 Automation Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do to automatically start driving web traffic is add content consistently.
If you need great topics for content that you can post on your website, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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