Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically bring web traffic is post web content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase of the traffic automation blueprint. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will discuss ways to automate traffic to your website using WordPress plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain 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:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would probably be higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating 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 marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites can and will make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more 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, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 you to avoid using black hat methods, sites, tools, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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, many businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to marketing channels individually, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social 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 details displays in the post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using 3rd-party commenting plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like adding twitter handles to comments, SEO backlinks, social enticements for sharing content, and ability to use keywords in the name. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this website for more information about this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to many authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many online platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins configured and set up, all you then need to do to start generating more traffic is publish great content regularly.
We have created an entire email course designed to help you never run out of content for 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 article in the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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