Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic 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 explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically bring more traffic is post fresh content consistently!)
In Part Two, we focus on 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 site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed configuring the system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the series, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can bring visitors automatically to your website or blog when you begin to post fresh content.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which expert you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending an hour each day (or more) posting content on social media while also trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you spent half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic 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 conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would most likely be significantly 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many business 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 social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more of your efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, 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 promote and market 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 that allows you to automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, time, and efforts 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 tools, websites, strategies, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
The focus of this series of articles is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose 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 content one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few plugins that can:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 many great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options appear in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically syndicated online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature lets your visitors interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content automatically to many traffic-generating platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social sites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about using this great 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 marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing many social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. For more information, go here:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you need to do is publish fresh content regularly to bring more web traffic organically.
We have created an entire email course designed to help you come up with limitless content for your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, 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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