Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is add great content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. 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 site, and what to do if your website is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can bring traffic automatically to your website.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two every day (or more) posting content on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around 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 most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the web traffic generation 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 of your efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, software, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to 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 small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as explained in Part Two. Then, configure everything as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate various processes with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on several social sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displayed in your post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
For more details about this plugin, visit this website: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that allows your visitors to engage with your web site, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like adding twitter handles to comments, SEO backlinks, ability to use keywords in the name, and social enticements for content-sharing. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
For more details about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful 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), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Go here for more info:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then have to do to begin bringing web traffic is post content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your website, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, 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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