Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add web content regularly to automatically generate more 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 website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we discuss ways to automate your traffic with WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up investing 1-2 hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small businesses 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 marketing experts advise. If you spent hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small 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 grow in order to survive.
Research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per 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 numbers would probably be higher.
- More than half of all small 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources 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 promoting and marketing your business on various social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more of your budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, 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 Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate the traffic generation process 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and efforts 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 recommend staying away from all black hat methods, tools, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites used 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, most business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different services one at a time, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, get it configured as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack
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 WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on several social media networks.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details in your post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
For more details about the benefits of this plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your blog readers interact with your website, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your post. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about using this powerful plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content to many authority platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content to many social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 online websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this great plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. If you are interested in learning more here:
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: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post new content on a regular basis to begin bringing traffic.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your web site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading about this topic, 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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