Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a regular basis to automatically bring more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand 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 website is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing guru you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day posting content on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you spent all of your time checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social sites, 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 companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic generation 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 channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, time, 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 urge you to avoid using black hat tools, websites, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites visited 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 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, resources, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving strategy 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 services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 explained in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social media sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in your post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function lets your blog readers engage with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about using this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you automatically syndicate your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content to over 30 authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many online websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore many social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. For more information, go here:
The above are just some 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is post new content regularly to start generating more traffic organically.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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"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
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