Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting new web traffic is add new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can get web traffic automatically to your website whenever you begin posting web content.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours just 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 grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the rest 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 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image 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 areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budgets, and time and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage 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 availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing 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. YouTube, 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 market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and your budget 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 recommend avoiding black hat software, websites, techniques, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of 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 get additional exposure online from sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to individual marketing channels, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones listed in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social media sites.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displayed in the post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for content sharing, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the user name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate content to dozens of online platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of social platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
The above are just a few 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 Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you need to do then to start generating more traffic is publish web content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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