Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin attracting more web traffic is post web content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of this blueprint. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was 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 discussed the configuration phase of the blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we will look at ways to automate traffic generation using a number of plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which online marketing gurus you talk to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours per day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you spend all of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small 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 stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was conducted today, the numbers would probably 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 every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more of your budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- 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 show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the traffic generation 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, budget, and efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat solutions, techniques, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of using this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content 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 website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using 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 plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, 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 loads of useful features.
After installing Jetpack, 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 on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content to various social media networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this great plugin, go here: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments 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. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter handles to comments, ability to use keywords in the name, search-indexable backlinks, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate content to over 30 social sites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many authority sites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), or if you want to learn more about social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out, see this article:
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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is post web content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating new web traffic.
If you need help coming up with endless ideas for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on growing your business 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 addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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