Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to start generating more web traffic is post content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation system. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, 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 we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help drive web traffic automatically to your website as you begin to add new content.
Depending on who you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, human 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 online marketing experts are prescribing. If you are spending hours checking LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time keeping 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.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of 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 companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat sites, methods, software, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article series is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one by one is very 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 services.
You can:
As your business evolves, you can add more functionality and automate processes like:
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 shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, 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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts on various social media 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 displayed in the Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party commenting plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your post. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about this handy plugin:
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to over 30 authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many social platforms, like:
Visit this website to learn more about using this powerful plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives here:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating the distribution of your content online.
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:
Once your website and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you then need to do to automatically start attracting traffic is post great content regularly.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you never run out of content for posting to your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading about this topic, click here:
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