Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain 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 attract traffic is post new content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase of the automation system. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get traffic automatically to your website when you begin to post content.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more each day promoting your business on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you spend half your day posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours 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 make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half of 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 numbers 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 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 leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind 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 have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, 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 The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend avoiding black hat software, sites, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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, most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for this strategy 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and web 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, configure it as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate your content distribution using plugins like the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, 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 Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social sites.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displays in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting system allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or plus1 your post. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate your content to dozens of online sites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content to dozens of authority sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: 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 marketing efforts), we have created a detailed article listing many social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. 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 System: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is add web content regularly to start attracting web traffic organically.
If you need great content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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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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