Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to begin bringing new web traffic is add content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase of the automation process.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help bring traffic automatically to your site just by posting fresh content.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent most of your time checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain 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:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around six 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 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media sites, 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 and will 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 a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budget, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process 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 channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and 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 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 that you stay away from all black hat methods, sites, tools, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is not to manipulate web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited 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, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can 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 Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other web properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on several social 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 displayed in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about using this great plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that allows your visitors to engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread 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 choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to over 30 online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of online sites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website for more details about the benefits of using this handy plugin: SocialLinkMachine
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 about social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about 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 System: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to start driving web traffic is post great content on a regular basis.
If you need endless great ideas for content that you can post on your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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