Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating more web traffic is publish new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the traffic automation blueprint. 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 site, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we discuss ways to automate your traffic with plugins.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which business marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more per day posting content on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you spend half your day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 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 conducted today, the figures would most likely be 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 are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save 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 exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have little to no control over (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more time, efforts, and budget 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 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 avoiding black hat strategies, sites, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but 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 visited by your target audience.
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, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate these processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn 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, 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 …
(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, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options show in your Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically syndicated online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature lets your site users engage with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter handles to comments, social enticements for content-sharing, using keywords in the username, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, visit this website:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate content to many social websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many authority sites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin, visit the plugin site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), go here for a detailed article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to attract web traffic is add fresh content regularly.
If you need endless ideas for content that you can post on your website, then subscribe to our FREE 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 addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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