Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site 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 One of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add great content on a regular basis to attract web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained 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 website, and what to do if your existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-getting process with plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which business marketing guru you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour or more each day promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent most of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (the other half 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 figures would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing 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 Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do 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, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
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 your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, strategies, tools, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles 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 frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to individual 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and 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 WordPress site as explained in Part Two. Then, configure everything as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins such as the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social media sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in your post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that allows your visitors to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, using keywords in the name, and adding twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to many online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), go here for a detailed article on social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc:
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: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins configured and set up, all you have to do is post content consistently to automatically drive more web traffic organically.
If you need great topics for content that you can post on your site, then subscribe to our email training series 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 section of the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of 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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