Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is publish new content on a consistent basis to automatically start driving traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed the configuration phase of the blueprint.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we look at ways to automate traffic generation with plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending an hour a day (or more) promoting your business on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you are spending half your day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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 grow in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 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 survey was done today, the figures would most likely 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.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in automation to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 marketing channels you should focus more efforts, time, and budget 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 strongly recommend staying away from all black hat software, sites, methods, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to 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 businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and web 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 configured as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones discussed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other web properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, 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 loads of great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several 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 account settings displayed in the Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your visitors interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a third-party commenting plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for content sharing, adding twitter names to comments, using keywords in the name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to many online websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to dozens of social websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website for more details about using this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. To learn more, 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 Automation System: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been configured and set up, all you have to do then is add web content on a consistent basis to start generating more traffic organically.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our email training series here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
***
"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)
***