Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic generation machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post great content on a consistent basis to automatically attract web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing website is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we discuss ways to automate your traffic using plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing experts you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spend hours checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each 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 use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the figures would most likely be 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 are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social 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 Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other companies (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating your traffic-getting 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, time, and efforts 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 strongly urge that you stay away from all black hat websites, techniques, software, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites that your target audience frequents.
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 financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of using this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach like 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 your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the process using plugins like the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other websites
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your posts to several social sites.)
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 in your post publishing section.)
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 new content will be automatically distributed online.)
Go here for more details about using this great plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your visitors interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a 3rd-party commenting plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed content to over 30 social sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to dozens of traffic-generating websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Go here to learn more:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically begin attracting web traffic is add new content regularly.
If you need great content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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