Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is post web content on a consistent basis to automatically drive web traffic!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. 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 site has been 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 look at the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help bring traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time 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.
Marketing research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed using 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 survey was done today, the numbers would most likely be 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind 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 Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more of your efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated 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 you to avoid using black hat methods, software, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in 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 sites 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 that most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different channels is very 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 WordPress website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some plugins that can:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically to several social media networks.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displayed in the post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting system allows your visitors to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing your content, ability to use keywords in the username, search-indexable backlinks, and adding twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content automatically to over 30 social sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about using this great plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools that you may want to check out here:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then have to do is add new content on a consistent basis to generate traffic organically.
We have created an entire email course designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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