Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post web content consistently to automatically attract traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase of the automation process. We explain 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 existing site is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed the configuration phase of the blueprint.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can drive new visitors automatically to your website.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which online marketing guru you listen to, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours or more every day posting content on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you spend most of your time posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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.
Research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the other half spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would probably be significantly 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic generation process 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 marketing channels you should focus more of your time, budget, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, websites, solutions, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites frequented 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, most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time can be 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and web 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as explained in Part Three. Once all of 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 traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media sites.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displayed in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, 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 like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like adding twitter names to comments, backlinks, social enticements for sharing your content, and ability to use keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many social sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a comprehensive article listing several social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. To learn more, go here:
The above are just some 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 Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically begin bringing new web traffic is publish web content on a regular basis.
If you need help coming up with great ideas for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe to our email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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