Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically start driving web traffic is post web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed the configuration phase of this blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get traffic automatically to your website just by posting content.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you spent all of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, 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 email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media 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 survey was done today, the numbers would probably be 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you invest more budget, efforts, and your time 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 neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote 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 for automating the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, 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 invest more of your budget, efforts, and time 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 you to avoid using black hat solutions, sites, techniques, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your 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, many 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 time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Automatically import content (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 or blog as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate these processes using plugins such as the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other online properties
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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, 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 …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social media networks.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin, go here: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function lets your blog readers engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, 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 backlinks, social enticements for content sharing, ability to use keywords in the user name, and the ability to add twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website.)
For more details about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to dozens of traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many online websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit this 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), go here for a detailed article on social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about:
The above are just a few 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 System: Automated Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you have to do then is add web content on a consistent basis to begin attracting new web traffic.
We have created an entire email course designed to help you come up with unlimited content for posting to your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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