Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to start generating new traffic is publish content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help bring new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which online marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spent hours checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours 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 grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would probably be 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 source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 vital areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time 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 social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation 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 marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the web traffic generation 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your 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 urge you to avoid using black hat tools, websites, methods, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how most small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this strategy 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Import content automatically (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, configure everything as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones discussed 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 Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social media networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in your publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically distributed online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, using keywords in the name, and the ability to add twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content to dozens of online sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article on social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more about this:
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 System: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to begin attracting traffic is post content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content ideas for your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading, click here:
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