Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to attract new traffic is publish web content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the traffic automation blueprint. We explained the best way to get started 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 two we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get web traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you were to spend half a day posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small 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 are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, 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 Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and time 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 sites, solutions, techniques, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels individually can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this strategy 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various social sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displayed in your Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many traffic-generating platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to dozens of online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore many social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is publish web content on a regular basis to automatically start generating web traffic.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with limitless content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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