Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically generate more web traffic is post fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can bring visitors automatically to your website.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour or more every day promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you spent half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the numbers 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.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media websites, 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 dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, tools, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is 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 that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different services one by one can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not do 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web properties using RSS
- Automatically import content (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 website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones listed in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several 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 account options in the post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the user name, social enticements for content sharing, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about this great plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to dozens of online sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 authority sites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
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), or to learn more about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about, see this article:
The above are just some 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 System: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins configured and set up, all you need to do then is publish web content on a consistent basis to generate more web traffic.
If you need ideas for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe 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 addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To keep reading, click on the link below:
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