Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is post great content regularly to attract more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we explain how to set up various plugins that can get new traffic automatically to your website just by adding content on a regular basis.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour each day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend half a day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small businesses 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 grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures 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.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another 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 have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites can and will make decisions that affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting 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 I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, websites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites 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 small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time 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 services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate the content distribution using plugins like the ones listed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social sites.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the Publish section.)
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 posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about using this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your visitors interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of social sites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of authority platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
For more details about the benefits of using this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about here:
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 System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you need to do then to attract more traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
We have created a complete email email-based training course aimed at helping you never run out of content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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