Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating more traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which business marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you were to spend most of your time posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping 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 done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per 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 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These sites can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation 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 channels you should invest more efforts, time, and your budget 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, websites, software, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites 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 most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is very 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins such as the ones listed in the following section.
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 look now at a few plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social media sites.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displays in the post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your site users to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this site to learn more about this great plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content to over 30 social websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc here:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 System: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add web content on a regular basis to bring web traffic organically.
If you need help coming up with unlimited ideas for content that you can post on your website, then subscribe to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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