Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add fresh content on a regular basis to begin bringing web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate your traffic using plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour a day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses 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 advise. If you were to spend half a day posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half 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 figures would probably be significantly 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, 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 focus more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, sites, software, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this series of articles is not to game online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can 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 how most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to each channel, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services individually can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for this time-saving strategy 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 services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on several social accounts.)
After all of the 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 displayed in the post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with 3rd-party commenting plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for content-sharing, adding twitter usernames to comments, using keywords in the user name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of traffic-generating sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of online platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a detailed article listing a number of social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here for more info:
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: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins configured and set up, all you have to do to begin bringing new traffic is post new content on a regular basis.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content 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 covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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