Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress 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 generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add great content on a regular basis to start driving web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(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 Part 4, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-generation process using a number of plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could end up trying to spend an hour each day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spend hours posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used 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 research was done today, the figures would probably 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. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business 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 exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, 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 The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating your traffic-getting 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 costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, efforts, and budget 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 recommend avoiding black hat solutions, sites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites 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 business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to each channel, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one at a time can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 things as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the content distribution 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 Web Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media 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 settings appear in your publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your visitors engage with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, +1, or like your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your site.)
For more details about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating sites, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this handy plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article on social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
The above are just a few 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: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is post great content on a regular basis to generate traffic organically.
We have created a complete email course designed to help you come up with unlimited content for posting to your web site:
Once you have 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 Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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