Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish new content consistently to start generating new traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase of the automation process. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we explain how to set up various plugins that can drive new visitors automatically to your site just by publishing content.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spent half a day checking LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per week on social media (the other half 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 numbers would most likely be 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited 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 promoting and marketing your business on various social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, time, and your 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 tools, sites, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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 businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and web 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 site as explained in Part Two. Then, configure things as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins like the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social media networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings show in the Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature lets your visitors engage with your web site, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter handles to comments, using keywords in the name, SEO backlinks, and social enticements for content-sharing. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that lets you drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 online websites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. For more details, go here:
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 System: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you have to do then is add fresh content regularly to automatically generate more web traffic organically.
If you need great topics for content that you can post on your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading this article, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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