Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically start generating more web traffic is add great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we discuss critical setup decisions. 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we will discuss ways to automate traffic generation using a number of WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could end up spending an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you were to spend half a day checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 survey was conducted today, the figures would probably be higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create 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. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social 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 dramatically affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in business automation to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, 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 allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat strategies, solutions, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites used 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, many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for this approach 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 the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate the content distribution using plugins like the ones listed in the section below.
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 number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social media networks.)
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 account settings displays in your post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure for your content online on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the username, SEO backlinks, adding twitter handles to comments, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 social websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of authority platforms, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit the plugin website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article on social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about. To learn more, go 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 Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating traffic.
If you need help coming up with great ideas for posting content on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
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 our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click here:
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