Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we explain 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 attracting traffic is post fresh content consistently!)
In Part Two, we focus on the setup phase of the automation process. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which online marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media while also managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you spent half a day posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per week on social media (the rest 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 probably 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time 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 social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies can and will make decisions that impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more of your budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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 show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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 avoiding black hat software, sites, methods, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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 experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services one at a time can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels 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 site as described in Part Two. Then, get it configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution 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 some examples of plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social networks.)
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 displayed in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that allows your visitors to interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
For more information about this WordPress plugin, visit this site:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many online sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article on social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and configured, all you need to do then is add fresh content on a consistent basis to begin attracting traffic.
We have created an entire email email-based training course designed to help you never run out of content for your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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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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