Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting new traffic is publish great content regularly!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase of this process.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get new traffic automatically to your website.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which business marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could end up investing a couple of hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you spent hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 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 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. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
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 marketing budgets, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
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 strategy for automating your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, time, and 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 recommend avoiding black hat techniques, sites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to game online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites 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 most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be very 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 useful features.
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 …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to various social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options show in your post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro 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 SEO backlinks, social enticements for sharing your content, adding twitter usernames to comments, and using keywords in the name. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 social sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin site for more information about the benefits of this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to start generating new web traffic is post web content consistently.
If you need help coming up with great topics for content that you can post on your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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