Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is add content on a consistent basis to automatically generate traffic!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, we discuss ways to automate traffic generation using various plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you talk to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you spend hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours 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 done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all small 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: 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 of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many 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 promoting and marketing your business on a number of social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to save 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 many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more time, budget, and your efforts 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 neglecting your own website?
- 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 we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and your 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat software, sites, methods, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 as explained in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the process using plugins such as the ones discussed below.
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 look now at a few plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other blogs via RSS
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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on several social 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 account options in the post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature allows your site users to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit this site:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed content to many authority websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to many authority platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of authority sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: 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 efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about. For more info, see this article:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 System: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is post new content consistently to drive traffic.
If you need help coming up with endless topics for posting content on your web site, then subscribe to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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