Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting new web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We explain the best way to start 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 existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help bring traffic automatically to your site.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could end up investing a couple of hours each day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spent half a day checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each 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 done today, the figures would most likely be 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources 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 marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media 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 YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these 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. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with 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 web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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 solutions, sites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means 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 limitations.
So, instead of posting content to individual marketing channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the content distribution with plugins like the ones listed in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other blogs via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social accounts.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings show in the post publishing box.)
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 new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your visitors to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
For more details about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate your 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 your content automatically to over 30 online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a detailed article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here for more details:
The above are just a few 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 Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do to automatically attract traffic is publish content on a consistent basis.
If you need help coming up with great topics for posting content on your website, then subscribe to our FREE email training series on 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 addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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