Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post new content consistently to attract web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website 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 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase of the traffic automation process.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can bring web traffic automatically to your website or blog when you begin to publish content on a regular basis.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour or more a day posting content on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you were to spend hours checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time simply 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 grow in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per 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 was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would probably be even 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider 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 don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more time, budget, and efforts 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 your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat methods, tools, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of 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 increase your exposure online to sites used 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 business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means 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 budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels one by one, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to services one by one is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy like the one shown below 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Import content automatically (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 explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate the process with plugins such as the ones listed in the next 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 plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, 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 many useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social media sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
Visit this site to learn more about this great plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using 3rd-party commenting plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many online websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore several social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here 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 Automation Blueprint: Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to automatically begin attracting traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
We have created an entire email training series aimed at helping you come up with limitless content ideas for posting to your website:
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 article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, 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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