Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing web traffic is add fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase of the traffic automation system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help get new traffic automatically to your website or blog when you begin to add web content consistently.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour a day (or more) posting content on social media, as well as running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you are spending most of your time checking Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Image source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their time 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 6 or more hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media 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 significantly 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, time, and resources and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time 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 significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the 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 resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate the web traffic generation 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 costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 websites, methods, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section how many small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of posting content to services individually, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Import content automatically (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 site as explained in Part Two. Then, configure things as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution 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 Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other sites via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displays in your Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically syndicated online.)
Visit this site to learn more about using this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting feature lets your blog readers interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using third-party commenting plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they +1, tweet, or like your post. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about using this plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content to many social websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out. If you would like to learn more here:
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 System: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then have to do to attract more web traffic is post new content on a consistent basis.
If you need help coming up with great topics for content that you can post on your site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on growing your business online with 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 covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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