Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically attract new traffic is publish new content regularly!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will discuss ways to automate traffic to your website using WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more each day posting content on social media while also trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you are spending hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time 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 YouTube. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat tools, websites, strategies, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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 how many small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to individual marketing channels, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as shown in Part 3. After all 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 Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generation plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 loads of great functions.
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 …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings in the publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
For more details about using this great plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your visitors interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress default 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 your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like SEO backlinks, the ability to add twitter names to comments, ability to use keywords in the user name, and social enticements for content-sharing. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of traffic-generating sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many authority sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. More information:
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 System: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do to attract traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
If you need great content ideas for your website or blog, 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 the process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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