Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish fresh content regularly to automatically attract traffic!)
In Part Two, we focus on the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where 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 can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we look at ways to automate traffic to your website with plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing experts you talk to, you could end up investing an hour or more a day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spend half your day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half of 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 research was conducted 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many 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 promoting and marketing your business on a number of 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 YouTube. These companies can make decisions that impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating business processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 time, budget, and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat software, methods, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article 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 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, most businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for this time-saving approach 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web 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 WordPress website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using 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 Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generating plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social media sites.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings show in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that allows your site users to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this site to learn more about this great plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many online sites, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content automatically to many authority platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), or to learn more about social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about, see this article:
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 Automation Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is publish great content on a regular basis to begin bringing more web traffic organically.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you never run out of content ideas for your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading, click on the link below:
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