Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post web content consistently to automatically begin bringing web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand 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 website, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get visitors automatically to your site whenever you begin posting web content.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on who you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours or more each day posting content on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget 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 hours checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small 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 stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, 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 use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the figures would probably be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. 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 prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, time, and resources and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your 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. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat websites, tools, methods, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to game web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels individually, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, get it configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins like the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on various social networks.)
After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displays in your publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content is automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using 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 +1 your post. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this website for more information about using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to many traffic-generating websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to many authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to automatically begin attracting new web traffic is publish great content consistently.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you never run out of great content for posting to your 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 section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To keep reading, click here:
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