Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained 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 begin attracting web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we focus on the setup phase of this process. 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 existing site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we look at ways to automate the traffic-generation process with plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours or more each day posting content on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend half a day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent six 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 research was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating 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)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing 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 Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating business systems and processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more 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. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 recommend staying away from all black hat sites, solutions, strategies, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels can be extremely 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social 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 WordPress website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins.
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 a number of WordPress plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically to various social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options appear in your publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your site users engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for content-sharing, using keywords in the name, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this site:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content automatically to dozens of online sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of authority sites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: 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 campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article on social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc. For more details:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and configured, all you then need to do to automatically generate web traffic is add great content regularly.
We have created a complete email series aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content for posting to your site:
Once you have 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 series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading about this topic, click here:
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