Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article 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 automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post great content consistently to begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the traffic automation system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we discuss ways to automate traffic generation using various WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which business marketing guru you listen to, you could find yourself investing 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you were to spend hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 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 research was done today, the figures 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your budget, time, and your efforts 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 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 solutions, sites, strategies, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins like the ones shown 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 a few traffic-generation plugins that can help to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 loads of useful features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part 3.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social networks.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in your Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your site users engage with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like ability to use keywords in the username, social enticements for sharing your content, backlinks, and adding twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here for more information about the benefits of using this powerful plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to many social websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 online websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Go here for more information about this great plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. For more info, 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 System: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is publish content on a consistent basis to automatically bring web traffic organically.
We have created a complete email email-based training course designed to help you come up with endless content for your web site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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