Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website 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 article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add new content consistently to generate 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 everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate traffic generation using plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you spend most of your time checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (most of the other 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 significantly 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budgets, and resources and many business 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 websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, 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 channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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 recommend staying away from all black hat software, strategies, sites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of services like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to game online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and 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 that most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social media accounts.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in your publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature lets your visitors engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing your content, adding twitter names to comments, using keywords in the name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 social platforms, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 social sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit the plugin site: Social Link Machine
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), or to learn more about social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc, refer to this article:
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 Automation Blueprint: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically generate web traffic is post web content consistently.
If you need great content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on growing your business with 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 explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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