Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and 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 is publish content regularly to automatically generate more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase of the traffic automation blueprint. We help you understand 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 website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate your traffic using various plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could end up spending 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the rest 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 most likely be significantly 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating business processes to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend staying away from all black hat sites, software, methods, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites 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 small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to each service, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use a smarter, time-saving approach 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate your 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 Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, 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 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 the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to various social media accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displays in the Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that allows your site users to engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for content sharing, adding twitter usernames to comments, SEO backlinks, ability to use keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin, visit the plugin site:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of social sites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a detailed article listing several social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. See this page to learn more:
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: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and configured, all you have to do then to automatically generate web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you never run out of great content for your website or blog:
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 the series.
This is the end of Section Four
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"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
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