Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add great content regularly to attract web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We explain 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will look at ways to automate the traffic-generation process with different plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which online marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you spent hours posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, 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 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media 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 most likely be even 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, time, and efforts 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat software, sites, strategies, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to 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
We’ve just seen that many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
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 choose 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate various processes using plugins such as the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn 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 loads of great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on various social media networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here for more information about the benefits of this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to many online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here for more information:
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 System: Automated Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you have to do is publish content regularly to begin bringing new web traffic.
If you need help coming up with endless ideas for posting content on your web site, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business online with content marketing here:
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 series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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