Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to begin bringing more traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of the automation system. 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 site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we look at ways to automate your traffic using plugins.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day posting content on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you spent half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per 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 research was done today, the figures 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, all of your efforts are going 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 notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 marketing channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your time 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 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, strategies, software, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose 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 content one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social accounts.)
After all plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options appear in the post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically syndicated online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting feature lets your blog readers interact with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a third-party commenting plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like SEO backlinks, ability to use keywords in the username, adding twitter usernames to comments, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about the benefits of this great plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to dozens of authority websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many authority sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about here:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is publish fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically attract more traffic.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your website:
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 the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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