Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is add fresh content regularly!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive visitors automatically to your site just by publishing web content consistently.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself spending an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses 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 recommend doing. If you are spending hours checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half 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 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 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 are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, 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 Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 that you stay away from all black hat methods, sites, tools, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The focus 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 increase your exposure online to 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, human resources and financial means 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 is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to services one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this strategy 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 services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, configure it as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other websites via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, 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, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media networks.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings show in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your visitors interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about using this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to many social sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of authority websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about. Visit this page to learn more:
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: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to automatically attract web traffic is publish great content consistently.
We have created an entire email training series designed to help you come up with limitless content for posting to your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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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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