Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add new content on a regular basis to drive web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will look at ways to automate traffic generation using various plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours or more per day promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you were to spend half a day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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.
Marketing research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of 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 StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more of your budget, time, and efforts 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 your own website?
- 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 Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, 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 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat software, sites, methods, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to game 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 visited 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 many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving strategy like this 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 services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other online properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish your 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, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on 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 account details appear in your publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that allows your visitors to interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the username, adding twitter usernames to comments, search-indexable backlinks, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
For more details about using this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to many traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 social sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of using this great 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 distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. For more info, see this article:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing the distribution of your content online.
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 Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to automatically bring more web traffic is publish fresh content on a regular basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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