Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is add content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting web traffic!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we look at ways to automate traffic to your website with different WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you spend half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per 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 survey was done today, the numbers would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating 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. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important 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 don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your 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. Facebook, LinkedIn, 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 Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat tools, strategies, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to be smart with your limited 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to each marketing channel, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one by one is 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure your site settings as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts on various social media networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options appear in the publishing area.)
Now, whenever 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 syndicated online.)
This is a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like SEO backlinks, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, social enticements for content sharing, and ability to use keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to dozens of traffic-generating sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many authority websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this handy plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. Go here to learn more:
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 Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do then is publish great content consistently to automatically bring web traffic.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you come up with limitless content for your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click here:
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org
***