Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing web traffic is add web content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase of the automation process. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will discuss ways to automate traffic to your website with WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on who you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend 1-2 hours or more per day posting content on social media.
Many business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you spend hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s 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 businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used 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 significantly higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula 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 other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat tools, strategies, websites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article series is not to manipulate web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to 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, many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be 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 one-time, 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
- 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other blogs via RSS feeds
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically 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 settings displays in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter names to comments, ability to use keywords in the name, backlinks, and social enticements for content sharing. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed your content to many social sites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to many authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 social platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article where we explore several social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc. For more details, go 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: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to begin attracting new web traffic is add web content on a consistent basis.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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