Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive visitors automatically to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add new content regularly to begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we will discuss ways to automate traffic to your website with plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent all of your time posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (the rest 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 conducted today, the figures would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small 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 areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites can and will make decisions that affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budget, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more of your efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on 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 With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time 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 staying away from all black hat solutions, websites, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites used 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, many small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to services one at a time, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this 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 services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 WordPress website as shown in Part 2. Then, get it configured as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate the process using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn 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 useful features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several 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 account settings displays in your publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your visitors interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like backlinks, using keywords in the username, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate your content to over 30 authority websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to many online platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many online sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, 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 this powerful plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article on social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out. To learn more, go here:
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 System: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to begin attracting web traffic is add new content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you never run out of content ideas for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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