Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically attract traffic is publish content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation system. We explained the best way to start 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 using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or more a day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you are spending hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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 make sales 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 6 hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the figures would probably be 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.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget and many 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 media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- 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 strategy that allows you to automate 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more time, budget, and efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat websites, solutions, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to 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 that most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to each different channel, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do 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 the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate these processes using plugins such as 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 System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social media sites.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings in your post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post will be automatically distributed online.)
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your visitors interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, tweet, or like your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of this great plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate your content to many authority platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to many authority sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 social platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), or to learn more about social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives, refer to this article:
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 Automation Blueprint: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do then is post fresh content consistently to automatically begin bringing traffic.
If you need endless content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training course on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading, click on the link below:
***
"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
***