Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is post fresh content regularly!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate the traffic system with different plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which business marketing experts you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spend hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s 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 VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small 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 done today, the figures would probably be 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small 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 vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other companies (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more time, efforts, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 staying away from all black hat tools, websites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited 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 businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to marketing channels one at a time 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots 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 Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on various social accounts.)
After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings appear in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your blog readers interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter names to comments, ability to use keywords in the name, SEO backlinks, and social enticements for content-sharing. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this great plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate content to dozens of online platforms, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of authority sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. To learn more, go here:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you need to do is post content consistently to generate more traffic.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you never run out of great content for your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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