Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically attract web traffic is add fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the traffic automation system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we discuss ways to automate the traffic-getting process with different WordPress plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing guru you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend most of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per week on social media (the other half 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 conducted today, the figures 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small 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 time, resources, and budgets and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. 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 online properties.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing 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 marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more of your budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, time, and your 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, solutions, sites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to each different channel, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually can be extremely 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 WordPress website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, configure it as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins like the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content to several social media sites.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displayed in your post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically distributed online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature lets your blog readers engage with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the user name, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, social enticements for sharing content, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to many traffic-generating sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 online platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore many social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here for more details:
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 System: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do is add content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting traffic.
We have created an entire email course aimed at helping you never run out of great content for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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