Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic generation machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish great content regularly to start generating new traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website 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 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help get traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could end up investing an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media while also managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Many businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spent most of your time posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small 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 use 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 to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media 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 YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat sites, techniques, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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, many small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to different services one by one, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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, get it configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
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 brief look at a number of plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media networks.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details appear in the Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
For more information about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit this site: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system lets your site users interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party commenting plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, social enticements for sharing your content, and ability to use keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this website for more details about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to many online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 social websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: 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 tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out. More info:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 System: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you need to do to begin bringing traffic is publish web content consistently.
We have created a complete email email-based training course designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your web site:
Once you have 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
To read more, click here:
***
"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
***