Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to start driving traffic is add web content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of this process. We help 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 existing site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase of this system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help drive traffic automatically to your site as you begin posting web content regularly.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more per day promoting your business on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you spent half a day checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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 done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used 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 research was done today, the figures would probably be significantly 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.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budget 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 promoting and marketing your business on a number of social 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 sites can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever 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 business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the 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 costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset 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 urge you to avoid using black hat tools, sites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small 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 resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to different services one by one, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as explained in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, 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, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts on various social networks.)
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 details appear in your Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides you with an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your blog readers interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a third-party commenting plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
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, +1, or like your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many online platforms, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: 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 marketing campaigns), go here to learn more about social media measurement tools that you may want to check out:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is add content on a regular basis to automatically begin bringing traffic.
If you need topics for content that you can post on your site, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To continue reading this article, 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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