Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin attracting new traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can get traffic automatically to your website or blog simply by publishing content on a consistent basis.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you spent hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using 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 survey was done 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 are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your budget, efforts, and your 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 the benefits of building content on your own website?
- 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 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 web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend staying away from all black hat techniques, software, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game 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 get additional exposure online from 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 small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use a smarter, time-saving strategy like the one shown below 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 services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as described in Part 3. 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 Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of WordPress plugins that can:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various social accounts.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options show in your Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your visitors interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like adding twitter usernames to comments, social enticements for content sharing, search-indexable backlinks, and ability to use keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about using this great plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to dozens of social platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many online sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this handy plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
The above are just some 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: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you need to do then to start generating more web traffic is post great content on a regular basis.
If you need endless great ideas for posting content on your site, then subscribe to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
***
"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
***