Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post content consistently to start generating more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get traffic automatically to your website or blog when you begin adding new content regularly.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour a day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you spent hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (most of the other 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 probably be higher.
- More than half of all small 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. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more efforts, budget, 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 ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market 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 lets you automate 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, budget, and your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, sites, solutions, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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 that many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget 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 budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some plugins that can help to:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other websites 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 new content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social sites.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party commenting plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they plus1, tweet, or like your post. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin website for more details about the benefits of this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of online platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a comprehensive article listing a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you then need to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email course designed to help you never run out of content ideas for your web site:
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 our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading about this topic, click on the link below:
***
"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
***