Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site 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 site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to start attracting web traffic is publish great content regularly!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new traffic automatically to your website or blog simply by posting new content.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing experts you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours per day (or more) posting content on social media while also managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you spend half your day checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping 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 done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 survey was conducted today, the numbers 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend 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 in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your web traffic generation 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 budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat strategies, sites, solutions, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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, many small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to each service, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be very 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some WordPress plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displays in the 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 posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting function lets your site users engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing content, the ability to add twitter names to comments, ability to use keywords in the user name, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
For more information about this powerful plugin, visit this site:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore over 30 social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. For more information, go here:
The above are just a few 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: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is post great content consistently.
If you need ideas for content that you can post on your website, then subscribe to our email training series here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading, click here:
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