Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically attract new web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on 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 website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on the configuration phase of this process.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help bring web traffic automatically to your website.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself investing an hour or two (or more) every day posting content on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you spent half a day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours keeping 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 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six 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 done today, the numbers would most likely be higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budgets, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting 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 Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 invest more efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 recommend avoiding black hat strategies, software, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites visited 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, most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of using this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to individual channels is extremely 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 site as shown in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can 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 Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn 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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to various social media networks.)
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 show in the Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using 3rd-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type 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 create more user engagement on your web site.)
Go here for more information about this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to many online websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many social websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this handy 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 detailed article about social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns here:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 WordPress site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is publish web content regularly to automatically generate web traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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