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WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Part 4 (Automation)

This is part 4 of a 5-part series on how to create an automated traffic generation system for your WordPress site. This tutorial shows you how to set up a number of plugins that will help drive traffic automatically to your WordPress site.

Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.

So far, we have covered the following in this series:

In Part 1 of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained 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 publish fresh content regularly to generate more web traffic!)

In Part 2, we discuss critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.

(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)

In Part 3, we discuss the configuration phase.

Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …

(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)

In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get new traffic automatically to your site when you begin to publish content regularly.

Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?

Depending on which expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.

Many businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you spent hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?

(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)

Many business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.

Research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:

Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each 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 research was done today, the numbers would probably 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.

(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)

As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …

(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)

Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, 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 impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.

Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budgets. For example:

Which marketing channels do you invest more 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 ignoring your own domain?
Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?

The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress

What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.

With this formula, you will be able to:

Save time creating web content and social media,
Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and your 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 staying away from all black hat websites, solutions, methods, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..

(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)

The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can 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 how most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.

So, instead of posting content to different channels, which is very time-consuming …

(Posting content to individual channels can be 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.

You can:

Automatically distribute content to social media sites and 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 get all of this done?

Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part 3. 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 Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins

Let’s take a look now at a number of plugins that can:

Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
Post content automatically to other web properties via RSS

Jetpack

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 WordPress plugin like JetPack.

Download URL: https://jetpack.com/

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful features.

After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …

(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)

Next, activate a feature called Publicize …

(Jetpack – Publicize)

Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …

(Share your posts on 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 options displays in your post 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 distributed online.)

Go here to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com

CommentLuv

(CommentLuv)

The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your visitors interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.

You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.

For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like search-indexable backlinks, ability to use keywords in the user name, social enticements for sharing your content, and adding twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking submit.

(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)

Go here for more details about this plugin:

CommentLuv Premium Plugin For WordPress

Social Link Machine

(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)

SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …

(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to many online sites)

With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many social sites, such as:

Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.

Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin: 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 efforts), we have written a detailed article listing many social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out. Go here for more details:

Social Media Measurement Resources For WordPress Users

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:

How To Kickstart The WordPress Traffic Automation Process To Your Website Or Blog

WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary

Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you need to do is add great content on a regular basis to automatically attract more traffic organically.

If you need endless great ideas for posting content on your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training series on content marketing here:

Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.

This is the end of Section 4

To read the rest of this article series, click here:

Website Traffic Blueprint Part Five – How To Turn Your WordPress Site Into A Traffic Machine

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WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Part 5 (Optimization)

This is part 5 of a 5-part series on how to create an automated traffic generation system for your WordPress site. This tutorial explains how to optimize your WordPress traffic system once your WordPress site has been expertly configured and setup.

Welcome to Part 5 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.

So far, here is what we have covered in this series:

In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …

(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add great content consistently to begin bringing more traffic!)

In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.

(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)

In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase. We explained how to configure webhosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …

(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)

In Part 4, we discussed ways to automate the traffic-getting process with plugins.

(Publish once to WordPress and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels!)

In this section of the WordPress web traffic automation blueprint article series, we look at ways to optimize the traffic system with different tools and strategies.

WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Optimization Systems

In addition to having an expertly configured WordPress site, the key to generating targeted traffic on a consistent basis is having a well-defined business vision, sound digital planning, and excellent systems in place.

(Generating automated traffic is the product of a business vision, sound planning, and excellent systems)

Let’s review the systems that will help you grow and manage all traffic.

These include:

Marketing Systems – How you create new traffic for your website.
Technical Systems – How you ensure that your digital presence remains up and running for receiving new traffic.
Business Systems – How you manage and respond to traffic.

(Systems help you grow and manage your traffic)

Let’s briefly review how important these systems are for optimizing traffic:

Marketing Systems

Your marketing systems consist of the processes and methods used to drive new traffic to your business. You can test your marketing systems by asking questions such as:

What is your content marketing strategy?
What resources and portion of your marketing budget will you allocate to these channels?
Who will create your content, sales funnels, and marketing campaigns?
How will you test and measure the results of your online campaigns?

During the setup and configuration phase, you should have installed an analytics program (e.g. Google Analytics). If you’re just starting out, you may want to consider investing in some paid advertising (e.g. pay-per-click ads) to help generate some actionable data, such as the keyword phrases people are searching online to find your website, which you can use to create content better targeted to your audience’s needs.

Technical Systems

Your technical systems keep your online presence up and running for receiving traffic. There’s no point driving traffic to your website if your site is down or your web pages take too long to load.

Your systems need to be able to adequately handle areas like webhosting, website maintenance and support, installing, configuring, and updating new software (e.g. plugins), integration, customization, troubleshooting, etc.

Your technical systems can be tested by asking questions such as:

Who will look after my webhosting?
Who will look after my website and keep my site, plugins, themes, etc. maintained and up-to-date?
Who will fix errors, troubleshoot problems, provide technical support and advice, etc. if you experience difficulties?

Many potential issues can be minimized if your website planning process and setup and configuration phases have been completed correctly. As with all technology, however, you can expect problems. You will need the right technical systems in place to handle these.

Business Systems

Your business systems and processes help you manage and respond to the influx of new traffic. This includes:

Communication systems
Resources management – human, financial
Handling sales inquiries
Order fulfillment
Customer service/training
etc.

If you plan to outsource your digital marketing and technical support, then you will need to put systems in place for managing all outsourcing processes.

WordPress Traffic System – Optimizing Traffic Generation

If your business objectives are clear and your systems and processes are in place, all you need to focus your efforts on is growing a “traffic loop”.

Let’s walk through an example of implementing, optimizing, and automating a traffic loop. Take a look at the flowchart below …

(Implementing, optimizing and automating a traffic loop)

Increase Reach And Visibility

The first step of the process is to expose your business to as many potential users as your resources allow.

Useful Tips & Ideas

Your expertly configured WordPress site allows you to instantly share your content on traffic-getting sources like Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, etc. The easiest way to increase your reach and visibility online, therefore, is to simply publish more content through your expertly configured WordPress site.
As mentioned earlier, investing in some paid advertising can help you generate some initial data, which you can use to create content better targeted to your audience’s needs.
Repurpose your content to leverage different media formats.
Continue learning about ways to get more web visitors using methods like paid advertising, YouTube, email ads, etc.

Tools & Methods

See earlier sections of this article series for many excellent plugins, tools, and strategies we’ve already covered to help you reach more members of your target audience.

Also, see other posts and tutorials on this site to learn more about plugins that allow you to easily add the following to your website:

Share your posts online,
Run contests, offer downloads or discounts for likes/shares,
Display user generated content, feeds, etc.
Distribute content online in various media formats (e.g. videos, PDF guides, slides, etc.)

Build Authority & Credibility

Getting more of your content out there is great, but to make this activity more effective, your content also needs to build authority and credibility with users.

Publishing authoritative content not only helps to establish your credibility, it also improves your chances of getting it shared around and hence more visitors.

Useful Tips

Focus on creating and publishing content that will add value to potential users and showcase your expertise. This includes content that informs and educates readers, training content, case studies, adding testimonials, etc.
Consider publishing a PDF guide that can be sold or distributed online.

Plugins, Tools, & Strategies

We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you never run out of great content for your website:

Also, ask us about WordPress plugins that let you easily add the following to your website or blog:

Legal Pages
Testimonials
Customer Support (e.g. Helpdesk, Live Chat, etc.)
Ratings
User Reviews
Badges/Certificates Of Recognition

Grow Influence And Engagement

At some point, you may want to consider developing “traffic on demand.” You can achieve this by growing a list or starting your own community.

With “Traffic On Demand,” all of your traffic comes from customers or subscribers – people who already know you and trust you. Your influence and credibility can be used to generate traffic with a single blog post or broadcast.

Tips

Encourage commenting and discussions on your site.
Add an autoresponder newsletter and encourage people to subscribe.
Add a paid or free membership site.
Start or join a Facebook/LinkedIn Group.

Tools And Methods

There are many solutions and plugins that are easy to implement and can help grow your online influence and improve engagement. For example:

List-Building Solutions (e.g. Aweber, GetResponse, etc.)
Contact Forms, Live Chat
Forums & Discussion Groups (e.g. bbPress, BuddyPress)
Polls & Surveys
Webinars (e.g. Webinar JEO)
Comment sharing
Add media, video galleries, etc.

Identify Needs & Provide Solutions

If you take advantage of incoming traffic to discover what users want, you can have an endless funnel of ideas for new products, services, and solutions, all of which provide new opportunities for generating new sources of web traffic.

Useful Tips & Ideas

Create an e-learning course.
Consider publishing instructional PDF guides that can be sold or distributed online.
Add an e-commerce store to your business.

Tools, Plugins, & Methods

If you plan to provide products and services online (as opposed to just providing information), then some of the more useful plugins you may want to add to your website include:

Membership Sites (e.g. Wishlist Member, S2 Member, etc.)
Learning Management Systems (e.g. Courseware)
Event Registrations (e.g. EventEspresso)

Analyze Data & Feedback

The final step of the process is the collection and analysis of data. By learning to interpret data gathered from existing traffic, you can discover new traffic opportunities.

You should already have installed an analytics program like Google Analytics on your site. Make sure you understand the metrics and can interpret the data.

WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Summary

Once you implement the above strategies, all you have to do is rinse and repeat, fine-tuning and refining your methods as you go to grow your traffic and get better your results.

In summary:

Begin with an expertly configured WordPress site backed by good marketing, technical and business systems,
Implement a content marketing strategy (consider adding some paid advertising to drive traffic and generate useful data) to increase your reach and visibility online,
Add plugins, list-building strategies, and other methods as necessary to help build authority, trust, and credibility, and also to increase engagement with visitors,
Promote any new solutions, products or services using your existing channels and strategies to generate additional streams of traffic,
Analyse your data and your results, automate your processes wherever possible, and begin the cycle again.

Hopefully, this post has given you a blueprint that will help you drive more visitors automatically to your web site and build a better business online.

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WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Part 2 (Setup)

This is part 2 of a 5-part series on how to create an automated traffic generation system for your WordPress site. This tutorial explains the processes and methods used in this system.

In Part 1 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, we explained that the key to turning a site into an automated traffic generation machine is to use an “expertly configured” WordPress website.

As we also explained, an expertly configured WordPress site is not the same as a professionally-configured WordPress site. An ”expertly configured” WordPress web site is a website or blog that is not only built using the WordPress CMS, but has also been expertly set up and configured (either by yourself or professionally) to take full advantage of the enormous power, features and built-in functionality of WordPress and the way it can be integrated with various sites, specifically in areas like search engine optimization, external site notification and analytics.

(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add content on a regular basis to generate more web traffic!)

Once your WordPress site has been fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is add great content regularly to start driving traffic.

As outlined in Part 1 of this article series, the components of this automated online traffic system are as follows:

Setup
Configure
Automate
Optimize

In this article, we look at the “Setup” phase of the blueprint. We will help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, or if you already have an existing site that may or may not have been built using WordPress.

WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Setup

If You Don’t Have A Website Yet

If you don’t have a website yet, then it’s really quite simple … build a WordPress site!

WordPress is the most powerful, flexible, cost-effective and the easiest to use content management system available. We provide many articles, tips, and tutorials about the benefits and advantages of using WordPress to grow your business online.

For example, to see just how popular WordPress has become, see this article: WordPress: Some Facts And Figures

After choosing to build your web presence with WordPress, the next step is to choose which WordPress platform you will run your web presence on.

This step is important as there are 2 types of WordPress platforms you can choose from …

WordPress – Self-Hosted Or Hosted?

(Self-Hosted vs Hosted WordPress Site)

WordPress offers both a ”hosted” and a “self-hosted” option.

WordPress.org lets you download the full-featured WordPress software for free and host a WordPress site or blog under your own domain name. This is the “self-hosted” WordPress option.

With the “hosted option”, WordPress hosts your site for free at WordPress.com. There are, however, a number of limitations on what you can and can’t do with your blog when it is hosted for free at WordPress.com.

If you plan to build a professional business presence online and you want to set up the traffic system described here, then you should choose the “self-hosted” WordPress platform. The benefits of choosing the “self-hosted” option (WordPress.org) far outweigh those of hosting a free blog at WordPress.com. You get to have complete control over your web presence and avoid the limitations of the hosted option. Keep in mind that you can overcome the limitations of the free hosting platform by upgrading to a paid option, but then why not start off with a WordPress site hosted on your own domain and avoid the hassles of upgrading later?

If You Have An Existing Website

If you already own an existing website, check if the site has been built using WordPress.

If you need help with this step, check this article: Tell-Tale Signs It’s A WordPress Blog And Free WP-Checking Tools

If your website is a WordPress website, move to the next step, and make sure that your site’s internal settings have been properly configured. We cover this step in more detail in another tutorial.

If your web site uses a platform technology other than WordPress, then you will need to make some choices.

Take a look at the flowchart below …

(Use this simple flowchart to help you decide how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)

Basically, you have two choices:

Replace your existing web site so that your main website is powered by WordPress, or
Keep your existing web site and add a WordPress blog. Your WordPress blog will then be expertly configured and used to drive traffic to your main web site.

If you choose to keep your existing site and add a WordPress-powered blog, make sure to use the self-hosted version of WordPress, which requires your own domain name and webhosting, but allows you to fully configure your site’s settings and customize the look and feel of your existing site using an appropriate theme for WordPress.

To use WordPress as your main website, install it in the “root” folder of your domain (i.e. http://www.mydomainname.com).

If you already have a website, then you will want to install WordPress in a subfolder of your domain, e.g. www.mydomainname.com/blog (you can name the subfolder anything you want).

If you have a site that you don’t want to delete or replace with a WordPress site, you can choose to set up your WordPress site or blog on an entirely different domain.

This way:

mydomainname.com – goes to your existing website
myotherdomain.com – goes to your WordPress site

Once you have set up your WordPress site, the next step is to configure it. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.

This is the end of Part Two

To keep reading about this topic, click on the link below:

Website Traffic Blueprint Part Three – A Complete Guide To Increasing Your Website Visitors Automatically

This tutorial is part of a comprehensive article series aimed at helping site owners learn how to grow their business online with a WordPress website and proven online marketing methods.

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Tag: Drive More Visitors To WordPress Site

WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Part 5 (Optimization)