Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you 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 One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to start driving traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of the blueprint.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help bring new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour a day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spend half your day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time 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 small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would most likely be even 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budgets and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other companies (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 budget, time, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat methods, sites, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited 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 business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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 the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically to various social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displayed in the Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting feature allows your site users to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread 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 +1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit this website:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 social platforms, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content to many social platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many social sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this great plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating the distribution of your content online.
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: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you have to do is add web content regularly to generate web traffic organically.
If you need help coming up with great topics for posting content on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have 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 article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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