Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated web traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add web content consistently to automatically begin bringing new traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help bring visitors automatically to your website.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing guru you get your advice from, you could find yourself investing an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you spent half a day checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Image source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media 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 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social 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 dramatically impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting 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-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website 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 budget, time, and your efforts 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 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 solutions, websites, techniques, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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, many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Automatically import content (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 shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins such as the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically to several social accounts.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displays in the publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to engage with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many online websites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here for more info:
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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do then is publish web content regularly to automatically start generating traffic organically.
We have created a complete email series aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your site:
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 article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading, click on the link below:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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