Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post great content regularly to automatically start generating more traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started 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 existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive new traffic automatically to your website or blog as you begin publishing content on a consistent basis.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could end up investing 1-2 hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you were to spend half a day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their time simply 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 in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (the other half spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would most likely be 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of 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 LinkedIn. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on 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 we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your web traffic generation process 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat strategies, sites, tools, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and 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 that many business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different marketing channels individually, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving approach 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
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 some WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(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, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to several social media sites.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displayed in your post publishing area.)
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 you publish, your new posts are automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like adding twitter usernames to comments, social enticements for sharing your content, using keywords in the user name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this great plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you drip-feed your content to over 30 social sites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of authority platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many social sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some 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: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins fully set up and configured, all you need to do to begin bringing traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email training series designed to help you never run out of content ideas for your website:
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 article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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