Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we describe 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 blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to automatically start generating more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of this system.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate traffic generation using a number of plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to run your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spend half your day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
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 make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 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 conducted today, the numbers would most likely 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have little to no control over (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated web 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 websites, solutions, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to 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 financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to services individually, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one by one is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this approach 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites 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 website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social media accounts.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post will be automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting function lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to over 30 social websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many authority platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore many social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here for more information:
The above are just a few 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 System: Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and set up, all you need to do then to automatically generate more web traffic is publish great content consistently.
If you need great content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our FREE email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading this article, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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