Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically start generating more web traffic is post great content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. We help 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 website, and what to do if your existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, we look at ways to automate the traffic-getting process using various WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most businesses 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 are advising. If you spent all of your time checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half 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 probably be even higher.
- More than half of all 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. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important 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.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time 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 StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, and budget 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat sites, methods, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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, most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy like the one shown below 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 your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 WordPress site as explained in Part 2. Then, get it configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins like the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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 – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your content to 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 options in your post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing content, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, SEO backlinks, ability to use keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about using this handy plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to dozens of authority platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about using this handy plugin, visit this website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a comprehensive article listing several social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. More info:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then need to do is post web content regularly to automatically begin attracting more web traffic.
If you need help coming up with great ideas for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
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 explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
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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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