Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically generate web traffic is add new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discuss critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed the configuration phase of the blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new visitors automatically to your website or blog when you begin publishing content.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which expert you talk to, you could end up spending 1-2 hours or more per day posting content on social media.
Most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you are spending all of your time checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply 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.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was conducted today, the figures would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create 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. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 time, marketing budget, and resources and many business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to save 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 small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’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 social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and 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 recommend staying away from all black hat websites, techniques, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
The purpose 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 in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites frequented 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, most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other online properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, 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 installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social media sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in your publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function lets your blog readers interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the name, social enticements for sharing your content, SEO backlinks, and the ability to add twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit this site to learn more about using this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you drip-feed your content to dozens of online sites, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 social sites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article about 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 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 System: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you need to do then is publish web content on a consistent basis to start generating new traffic.
If you need help coming up with endless topics for content that you can post on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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