Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to drive web traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can bring traffic automatically to your website or blog just by publishing fresh content.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which online marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you spend hours posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours 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.
Research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the numbers would probably be higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating 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 marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating business systems and processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you invest more 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, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your web traffic generation 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, tools, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and web 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 WordPress website as described in Part Two. Then, configure things as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate these processes with plugins such as the ones shown in the next section.
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 brief look at a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content to various social sites.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your visitors interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like adding twitter names to comments, social enticements for content sharing, ability to use keywords in the name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content automatically to many online sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 authority sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit this website for more details 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 detailed article listing several 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 affect your business,etc. More info:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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: Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to automatically attract more web traffic is publish great content regularly.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you never run out of great content for posting to your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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