Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article 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 is post new content on a consistent basis to automatically attract more traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will look at ways to automate your traffic using plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you are spending hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per 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 numbers would most likely 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media websites, 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 companies can and will make decisions that 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 have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
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 increasing availability of many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 channels,
- Determine which 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 recommend avoiding black hat solutions, strategies, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 site as explained in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins like the ones shown 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 look now at some examples of WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, 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 Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social media sites.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details in the Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your website, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, +1, or like your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
For more details about this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content to many social platforms, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. For more details:
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 System: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins fully set up and configured, all you then need to do to automatically drive traffic is publish web content consistently.
If you need help coming up with ideas for content that you can post on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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