Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post content on a regular basis to automatically drive more web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation system. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help bring new visitors automatically to your website.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, 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 marketing experts advise. If you were to spend half a day checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the rest 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 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, 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 The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic generation 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and 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 sites, methods, tools, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is not to game web services or flaunt 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 sites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different services one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving 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 the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 as shown in Part 2. Then, configure things as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins like the ones discussed in the following section.
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 traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, 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)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on various social sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in your post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this great plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your site users interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with 3rd-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they +1, tweet, or like your content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit this website:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to many social websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin site for more information about the benefits of this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), go here to learn about social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you have to do then to automatically begin bringing traffic is publish content on a regular basis.
We have created a complete email email-based training course designed to help you never run out of content for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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