Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new web traffic is add fresh content consistently!)
In Part 2, we look at critical setup decisions. We help 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 website, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to 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 help get new visitors automatically to your site.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you spent hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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 small businesses surveyed spent six 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 research was done today, the figures would probably be significantly 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of 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 YouTube. These sites can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your time 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 strategies, websites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to game online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to 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 most small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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:
- Distribute content automatically to social 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other websites via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displayed in your publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
This is a hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature allows your blog readers to engage with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the user name, the ability to add twitter names to comments, SEO backlinks, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and traffic and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate your content to over 30 social websites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, visit the plugin website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article where we explore many social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. To learn more, go here:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do to automatically start generating new traffic is add web content regularly.
If you need endless ideas for posting content on your website or blog, then subscribe to our email training course on growing your business with 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 series.
This is the end of Section 4
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