Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, 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 site, all you have to do is add web content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing more traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We explain the best way to start 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 is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we discuss ways to automate the traffic-getting process with plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more a day posting content on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you are spending most of your time checking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, 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 email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 research was done today, the numbers would probably be significantly 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time 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.
Investing in business automation to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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-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 social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more time, efforts, and budget 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 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, solutions, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to game online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use a smarter, time-saving approach like 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 your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, configure it as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate the process using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a number of traffic-generating plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on several social 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 account details displays in your post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this site: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting function lets your visitors engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for content-sharing, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, ability to use keywords in the name, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that lets you drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of authority websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this great plugin, visit this site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. More information:
The above are just a few 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: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then need to do to automatically begin attracting more traffic is add great content consistently.
We have created a complete email course designed to help you never run out of great content for posting to your web site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, 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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