Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic generating machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to generate more traffic is post new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase of this process.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will look at ways to automate your traffic using plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on who you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or more every day promoting your business on social media in addition to managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spend most of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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 grow in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each 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 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 even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many 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 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 Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- 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 show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more efforts, time, and your budget 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 sites, methods, solutions, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites frequented 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, many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins like the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social media networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in your publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically distributed online.)
This is a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your site users to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like using keywords in the user name, the ability to add twitter handles to comments, backlinks, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate your content to over 30 authority platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to many social platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many social websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here for more details about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about. 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 Blueprint: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to begin bringing traffic is post new content on a regular basis.
If you need endless ideas for content that you can post on your website, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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