Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating traffic is add great content regularly!)
In Part 2, we discuss critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to get started 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 existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get visitors automatically to your site just by publishing content.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing expert you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you were to spend half a day posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s 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 VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 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 numbers 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, 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 companies often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever 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 small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, 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 Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, solutions, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to 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, most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not do 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 WordPress site as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the 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 Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generating plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, 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 many useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displayed in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature lets your visitors interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, +1, or like your content. 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 choose to include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content automatically to over 30 social platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of online sites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin: 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 campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore many social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. More information:
The above are just a few 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 System: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and configured, all you have to do then to generate more web traffic is publish web content regularly.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, then subscribe to our FREE email training series on content marketing here:
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 section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading, click here:
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