Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we provided an overview of 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 website or blog, all you have to do to start generating more web traffic is post content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of the blueprint. 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 website is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various plugins that can get visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could find yourself spending an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media while also managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Most small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you spent all of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the rest 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 even 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more budget, time, and your efforts 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 neglecting 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 Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat techniques, sites, solutions, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels is extremely 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate various processes using plugins like the ones discussed in the following section.
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 quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various 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 options appear in the publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides you with an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
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 reward features like the ability to add twitter names to comments, using keywords in the user name, backlinks, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to many authority platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Go here to learn more about this:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 Automation System: Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to automatically drive more web traffic is add content on a regular basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training series 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 explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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