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 the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One, 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 site, all you have to do is add new content on a regular basis to automatically start generating traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss 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 can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-generation process with different plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media while also trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you were to spend hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media 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 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.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many different 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 social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 solutions, sites, methods, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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 that most business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving approach 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social media accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings in your publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function lets your blog readers engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the name, adding twitter names to comments, backlinks, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)
For more information about this plugin, visit this site:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 authority websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a detailed article listing over 30 social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. More information:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 System: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically start attracting web traffic is publish new content regularly.
If you need help coming up with ideas for content that you can post on your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly 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 article in the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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