Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn a site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post web content consistently to automatically start generating new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of the automation system. 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 site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on configuring the system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive new visitors automatically to your website.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which online marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you are spending half your day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per 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 use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would probably be significantly higher.
- More than half of all 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.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and publish 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 Digital Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new 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 focus more 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, Twitter, 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 The Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the traffic generation 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, time, and your efforts 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 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, websites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to individual marketing 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the process using plugins such as the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to various social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting system allows your site users to engage with your website, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, visit the plugin website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. For more info, see this article:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do is publish great content on a regular basis to drive web traffic organically.
If you need help coming up with great topics for content that you can post on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training course 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 covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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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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