Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically bring web traffic is publish great content consistently!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started 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 site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase of the traffic automation system.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help bring web traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour or more a day posting content on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you spent hours checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain 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:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the other half 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 conducted today, the numbers would probably 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.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 resources, budget, and time and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important 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 have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budget, and time. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have little to no control over (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 channels you should focus more of your efforts, budget, and your time 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 recommend staying away from all black hat methods, websites, tools, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is not to game web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most 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 choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services one at a time can be extremely 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 site as described in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options in your Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system allows your site users to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, ability to use keywords in the user name, adding twitter usernames to comments, 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 below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your site.)
Visit this website for more information about using this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate content to many social sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content to many traffic-generating platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, visit this website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), or if you want to learn more about social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about, refer to this article:
The above are just a few 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 Blueprint: Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then is publish great content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting new web traffic organically.
We have created an entire email training series aimed at helping you never run out of great content ideas for your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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