Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is publish new content regularly to automatically begin attracting new traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of the blueprint. We help you understand 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 website, and what to do if your website was 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.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we look at ways to automate traffic generation with different WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours each day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spent hours posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping 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.
A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media 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 probably be even higher.
- More than half of all small 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. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important 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 consider is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in automation to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat tools, sites, methods, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to individual channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not do this 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a number of traffic-generating plugins that can:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to several social sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in your post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your site users to interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your site.)
For more details about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit this website:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to many authority websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically begin attracting new web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email email-based training course designed to help you come up with endless content ideas for posting to your site:
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 the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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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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