Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to bring more traffic is add new content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase of this blueprint. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on configuring the system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can bring web traffic automatically to your website whenever you begin to post fresh content.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you are spending hours checking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, 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 done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each 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 research was done today, the figures 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, time, and resources and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business systems and processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more of your 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, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on 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 With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the traffic-getting process 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 channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend staying away from all black hat methods, websites, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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 small business owners 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, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to individual channels is very 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the process with plugins like the ones shown in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social media accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options in the publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, ability to use keywords in the username, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this website to learn more about this handy plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate content to dozens of online websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many online websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
For more details about this WordPress plugin, visit this site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore a number of social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about. Go here for 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 Automation System: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to start generating traffic is post web content on a regular basis.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you never run out of content for your web site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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