Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to begin attracting new web traffic is add fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-getting process with plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could end up spending an hour or two per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
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 spend hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small 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 remain 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 6 hours per week on social media (the rest 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 probably be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create 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 are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more of your budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat websites, solutions, methods, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate online 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 increase your exposure online to 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 small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part 2. Then, get it configured as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using 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 System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some traffic-generating plugins that can:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up 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)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on various social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings show in your Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your site users interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like SEO backlinks, ability to use keywords in the username, social enticements for sharing content, and the ability to add twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of authority websites, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article listing several social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. More info:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 Automation System: Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is add new content on a consistent basis to bring more traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training course on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section 4
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