Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically bring more web traffic is add fresh content consistently!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We helped you understand the best way to start 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will look at ways to automate the traffic-generation process using a number of plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you were to spend hours posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 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 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.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media sites, 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 can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- 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 strategy that lets you automate your traffic generation 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and 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 urge you to avoid using black hat websites, techniques, software, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing 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 in the previous section how most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels one by one, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be 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 the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 site as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to interact with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the user name, the ability to add twitter names to comments, social enticements for content-sharing, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about using this handy plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content to many authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of social websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, go here: 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 written a detailed article where we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. More information:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do to automatically generate traffic is add content on a consistent basis.
If you need topics for posting content on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click here:
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***