Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to drive traffic is publish great content consistently!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. 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 website, and what to do if your website is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive visitors automatically to your site when you begin to add fresh content consistently.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which expert you talk to, you could find yourself spending a couple of hours or more every day posting content on social media.
Most business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spend hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all 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 survey was done today, the numbers would probably be significantly higher.
- More than half of all 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 each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budget and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media 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 can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. 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 real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more of your budget, time, and your efforts 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 the benefits of building content on your own website?
- 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 I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online 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 methods, tools, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
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 financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to each service, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services one by one can be 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other online properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 loads of great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in the post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as 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 post is automatically shared online.)
For more information about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that allows your visitors to interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like using keywords in the user name, social enticements for sharing your content, SEO backlinks, and the ability to add twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to drip-feed content to many online platforms, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 online platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many traffic-generating sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit this website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article where we explore several social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc. For more details, go here:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically generate more web traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on growing your business with 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 the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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