Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing more web traffic is add new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase. 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help drive new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which business marketing expert you talk to, you could end up spending an hour every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you spent half a day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours 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.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 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 research was conducted today, the figures would probably be even 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of 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 StumbleUpon. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in automation to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat websites, strategies, software, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but 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 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 how many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to individual channels is extremely 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate various processes 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 number of WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn 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 features.
After installing Jetpack, 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 – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on several 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 account details displays in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as 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 is automatically distributed online.)
For more details about the benefits of using this great plugin, go here: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your site users engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party commenting plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates 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 wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
For more information about using this powerful plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 online sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this handy plugin: Social Link Machine
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 comprehensive article listing over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here for more information:
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 System: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do then to automatically attract web traffic is publish web content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly 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 series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading, click on the link below:
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