Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress 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 series:
In Part 1, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to generate web traffic is post web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything 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 a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new visitors automatically to your website or blog simply by posting web content consistently.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could end up investing an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you were to spend hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more 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 done today, the numbers would most likely be significantly 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.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time 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 Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on 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 I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, efforts, and budget on,
- Invest most of your 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat websites, strategies, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing 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 most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. 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 services one at a time can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites 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 described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure your site settings as shown in Part Three. Once all of 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 Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(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 Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several 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 details displayed in your Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this great plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers engage with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like ability to use keywords in the name, social enticements for sharing your content, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content to dozens of authority websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit the plugin website: Social LinkMachine
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 written a detailed article on social media measurement tools that you may want to check out here:
The above are just a few 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 System: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins configured and fully set up, all you need to do to automatically start generating new traffic is publish fresh content on a regular basis.
We have created a complete email training series aimed at helping you never run out of content for posting to your website:
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 Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To continue reading, click here:
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