Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to bring more traffic is publish fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. We help you understand 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 site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can bring new traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which online marketing gurus you talk to, you could find yourself spending an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you are spending all of your time posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Small 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.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per week on social media (the rest 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 conducted 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time each 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 puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can and will make decisions that affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other people (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market 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 method for automating the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, budget, and your efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat websites, software, techniques, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article is 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 used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and web 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 website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as shown 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 Web Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displayed in the Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function allows your blog readers to interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the name, social enticements for sharing your content, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 online platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 online websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of traffic-generating platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), or to learn more about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about, see this article:
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 Blueprint: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to automatically begin attracting traffic is publish great content consistently.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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