Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following 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 or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically attract new traffic is add fresh content consistently!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of this process.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, we look at ways to automate traffic to your website using WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which online marketing guru you talk to, you could end up spending 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you are spending hours posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: 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 also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six 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 was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would probably be 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many areas to focus on need 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 media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog 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 budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 urge you to avoid using black hat methods, tools, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to services one at a time, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you 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 System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties 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 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 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displayed in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your visitors engage 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 third-party commenting plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the username, social enticements for content sharing, adding twitter usernames to comments, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 authority platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many authority platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article listing 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 affect your business,etc. More info:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins configured and set up, all you have to do then to automatically bring more web traffic is add content regularly.
We have created a complete email series aimed at helping you come up with endless content ideas for your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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