Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post web content regularly to drive web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media while also managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you are spending most of your time checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 research was conducted today, the figures 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budgets, and time and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
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 don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses 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 and business managers, especially for those with limited time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more of your efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other people (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more time, budget, and your efforts 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat solutions, methods, websites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article series is 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 get additional exposure online from websites used by your target audience.
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, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels individually, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social 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 website as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with 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-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress 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 the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on various social networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content will be automatically distributed online.)
For more details about the benefits of using this powerful plugin, visit this site: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your blog readers engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for content sharing, adding twitter usernames to comments, and using keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate your content to dozens of social sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to many traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, visit the plugin site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article listing many social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. To learn more, visit this page:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you need to do is post content regularly to begin attracting more traffic organically.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on content marketing 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 article in our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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