Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One, we described 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, all you have to do to drive web traffic is add great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started 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 site is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive new traffic automatically to your site.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Many business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you spent half a day posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half 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 research was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be even 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time 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 companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business 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 online accounts.
Investing in business automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other companies (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting 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 Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, budget, and your 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 recommend staying away from all black hat tools, techniques, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites 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 how many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this approach 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and web 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate various processes using plugins such as the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other blogs via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, 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 many great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social media networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings in the post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your blog readers engage with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they +1, tweet, or like your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit this site:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of social websites, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to many traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of traffic-generating platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more details about the benefits of using this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore many social media tracking tools that you may want to check out. Go here for more info:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins configured and set up, all you then have to do to automatically attract web traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, then subscribe to our email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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