Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish great content regularly to begin bringing more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, 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 Three, we discuss the configuration phase of the automation process.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we will look at ways to automate the traffic-generation process with different WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to run your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours 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. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would probably be significantly 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 channels you should focus more time, efforts, and your budget 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat tools, strategies, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 site as shown in Part 2. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate the content distribution with plugins such as the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of traffic-generating plugins that can help to:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, 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 many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various social media networks.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options in the publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, visit this website: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting function allows your visitors to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this website:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to over 30 social websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many traffic-generating websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. 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 Automation System: Automated Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you need to do then is post content regularly to begin attracting traffic.
We have created an entire email course aimed at helping you never run out of great content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have 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 our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To keep reading, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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