Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we provide an overview of 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 blog, all you have to do is add new content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on critical setup decisions. 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 with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed configuring the system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on who you listen to, you could end up investing an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many business owners simply 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. If you were to spend all of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, 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: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 survey was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
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 focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset 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 urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, software, sites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article 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 websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to services one by one, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this strategy 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 explained in Part Two. Then, get it configured as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, 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)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on various social media accounts.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displays in the Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that allows your blog readers to interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the name, social enticements for content sharing, search-indexable backlinks, and adding twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to many authority platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 online websites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
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 comprehensive article where we explore over 30 social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. More information:
The above are just some 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 Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you have to do to generate traffic is add content on a regular basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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