Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article 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 web site, all you have to do is add new content on a consistent basis to attract new traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring the system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get web traffic automatically to your site.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media 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 research was conducted today, the figures would most likely be even 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic 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 important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your 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 methods, websites, software, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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 businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to services one at a time is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins such as the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts to several social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details appear in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically distributed online.)
For more details about this plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your visitors interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this website:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of authority platforms, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of online websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this site for more information about using this powerful plugin: 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 created a comprehensive article listing many social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. To learn more, visit this page:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do to automatically generate more web traffic is publish new content consistently.
We have created an entire email email-based training course designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for your site:
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 Part Four
To read more, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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