Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post great content on a regular basis to attract more traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help bring web traffic automatically to your website whenever you begin to publish fresh content.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself spending an hour or more a day posting content on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you were to spend hours posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to researching 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 business owners spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, 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 at least 6 hours per week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many different business 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 various social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in automation to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web 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 traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, tools, websites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article series is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to marketing channels one by one, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and web 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 WordPress site as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
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 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 your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several 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 account details displayed in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your site users interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the username, the ability to add twitter names to comments, social enticements for sharing content, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here to learn more about using this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of authority platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many online platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
For more details about the benefits of this great plugin, visit this website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do to automatically begin bringing new traffic is add web content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article series, 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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