Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and 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 add fresh content on a regular basis to bring traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of this process. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive traffic automatically to your website just by publishing new content.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending an hour or more a day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human 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 online marketing experts are recommending. If you spent hours checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time 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 grow in order to survive.
Research 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 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 figures 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more of your efforts, time, and your budget 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 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend avoiding black hat strategies, sites, tools, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section how most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels one at a time, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 site as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure your site settings 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 Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media networks.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in your publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
This is a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your site users engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter handles to comments, using keywords in the user name, social enticements for sharing your content, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about using this powerful plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to over 30 online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
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 detailed article where we explore many social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. Go here for more info:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you then have to do to drive web traffic is add new content on a consistent basis.
If you need ideas for posting content on your site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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