Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is add great content regularly to automatically generate more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation system. We explained the best way to start 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 website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new visitors automatically to your site.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you spend all of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media 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 conducted today, the numbers would probably be even 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 every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on 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 we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your 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 you to avoid using black hat sites, tools, strategies, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is not to game online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one can be very 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 your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure things as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins like the ones listed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, 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 many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on several social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in the Publish area.)
Now, whenever 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 syndicated online.)
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments 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 +1, like, or tweet 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 can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this handy plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate content to over 30 authority sites, build diverse 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 over 30 authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit this site: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. To learn more, visit this page:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is post new content consistently to drive web traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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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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