Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and 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 add fresh content regularly to generate more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We explained 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the traffic automation system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, we discuss ways to automate the traffic system using various plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself investing a couple of hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, 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 doing. If you are spending half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media 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 figures would most likely be higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social 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 StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business systems and processes to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budget, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more time, efforts, 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, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 avoiding black hat methods, solutions, sites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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 business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online 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 individual channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this approach 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:
- Distribute content automatically 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as shown in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides you with an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter handles to comments, backlinks, social enticements for content sharing, and ability to use keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about the benefits of this great plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that lets you automatically syndicate content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 online platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about using this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. For more details:
The above are just a few 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: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins configured and set up, all you then need to do is post fresh content consistently to automatically begin attracting traffic organically.
If you need endless great ideas for content that you can post on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on growing your business online with content marketing 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 series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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