Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post great content on a consistent basis to begin bringing traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation system. We explained 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 existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help get traffic automatically to your site.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could end up spending a couple of hours each day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend most of your time posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. 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 also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted 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 other half of 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 survey was conducted today, the figures would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all 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.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As 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 prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, time, and resources and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business systems and processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, tools, techniques, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to each channel, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy like this 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:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a number of WordPress plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to 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 share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social media 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 details displayed in the publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, 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.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your site users engage with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to dozens of social platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many traffic-generating sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article on social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
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 Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do is add content consistently to attract more traffic organically.
We have created an entire email training series aimed at helping you never run out of great content for posting to your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
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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