Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting web traffic is add content regularly!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive new visitors automatically to your website just by publishing new content.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could find yourself investing 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, 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 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time 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 affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more time, budget, and your efforts 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 Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat websites, solutions, strategies, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one is extremely 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack
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 WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content to various social networks.)
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 account settings appear in the publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that allows your blog readers to engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using 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 site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like SEO backlinks, ability to use keywords in the name, adding twitter handles to comments, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about using this plugin, visit this website:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically syndicate content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 authority websites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin website for more details about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore many social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. 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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically generate web traffic is add content on a consistent basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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