Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is publish new content on a regular basis to automatically generate traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase of the blueprint. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get new traffic automatically to your site.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours or more every day posting content on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you spent all of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time 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 make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using 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 research was conducted 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: 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 vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in automation to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, 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 Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more time, efforts, and your budget 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 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 urge you to avoid using black hat solutions, methods, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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 many small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means 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 budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels can be 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, configure it as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, 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 loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on various social media sites.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in the post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that allows your site users to interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about using this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to many online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. You can learn more here:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 Blueprint: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you then have to do is publish great content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting new traffic.
We have created a complete email course designed to help you never run out of content for your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading this article, click on the link below:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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