Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add great content consistently to bring more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we look at ways to automate the traffic system using WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you were to spend hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. 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 sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (the rest 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 research was conducted today, the figures would probably be even 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.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of so many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts 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 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 The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts 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 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 solutions, websites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites 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, most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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 channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social 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 WordPress website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, 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 the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to several social media sites.)
After all plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displays in your Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function lets your site users engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing content, adding twitter handles to comments, using keywords in the name, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of online platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this handy plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article where we explore a number of social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. More info:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and configured, all you then need to do is add fresh content regularly to automatically bring more web traffic organically.
We have created a complete email training series designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To keep reading this article, click on the link below:
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***