Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to attract more traffic is add new content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built with 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 system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can get web traffic automatically to your website or blog as you begin to post web content.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour a day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend half a day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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 in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used 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 research was conducted today, the figures 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budgets and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media 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 companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, budget, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic generation 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more time, budget, and your 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, techniques, solutions, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this strategy 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure your site settings as explained in Part Three. After all 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 Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media sites.)
After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using third-party commenting plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like search-indexable backlinks, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, using keywords in the name, and social enticements for content-sharing. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content to many social websites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about using this powerful plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. If you would like to learn more about this here:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you have to do to automatically start generating more traffic is add great content on a consistent basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
***