Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and 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 is add great content consistently to start driving traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new traffic automatically to your site just by posting content.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two per day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Most business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend hours posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many 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 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 YouTube. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- 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 share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, time, and efforts 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 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, solutions, methods, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but 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 sites 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 small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to services one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part 2. Then, configure everything as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, 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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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 the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displays in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Visit this website to learn more about using this plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function lets your visitors interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party commenting plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, social enticements for sharing your content, backlinks, and using keywords in the name. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore many social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some 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 Automation System: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then need to do is post web content on a consistent basis to attract new traffic organically.
We have created an entire email training series aimed at helping you come up with endless content ideas for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly 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 WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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