Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically attract traffic is add web content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on 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 website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we look at ways to automate traffic to your website using plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you were to spend hours checking LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers 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.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important 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 Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 channels you should focus more efforts, time, 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 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 urge you to avoid using black hat websites, software, methods, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to manipulate web services or flaunt their terms of service, but 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 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 business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services individually is 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online 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 website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish new 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 the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social accounts.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in your Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online websites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to over 30 authority sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of online platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this website: SocialLinkMachine
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), or to learn more about social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc, refer to this article:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Automation System: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and set up, all you then need to do to automatically begin bringing new web traffic is post web content on a consistent basis.
If you need endless ideas for content that you can post on your site, then subscribe to our FREE email training series on growing your business with 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 explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
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