Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post content regularly to bring traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we discuss ways to automate your traffic using various plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which business marketing gurus you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day posting content on social media.
Many small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent half a day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many 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 remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% 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 research was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be significantly 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 are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without consulting you. 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 virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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 Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 focus more time, budget, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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 recommend avoiding black hat techniques, websites, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other web properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 loads of great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social media networks.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings in the Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate content to over 30 authority platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many authority sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: Social LinkMachine
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 written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. To learn more, go here:
The above are just some 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: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and configured, all you then have to do is publish fresh content on a regular basis to automatically drive web traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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