Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explain 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 is post web content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing web traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped 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 website, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you were to spend hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Image source: 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 also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the figures would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small 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.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly 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 websites.
Investing in business automation to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting 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 Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your 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 strategies, software, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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 small 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 time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not use a smarter, time-saving strategy like 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate various processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social networks.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
For more information about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit the plugin site: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns here:
The above are just some 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: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to begin driving traffic is add great content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, we recommend subscribing to our FREE 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 section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
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