Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we provided an overview of 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 site, all you have to do is add fresh content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, we explain how to set up various plugins that can drive new traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself spending an hour each day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend most of your time checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time 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.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more 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 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more 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. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting 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 formula that lets you automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat tools, sites, techniques, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game 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 sites frequented by your target audience.
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, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of using this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this approach 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, configure things as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings appear in the publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that allows your visitors to engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like ability to use keywords in the user name, social enticements for content-sharing, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
Go here for more details about this handy plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to dozens of social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of authority sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about here:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and configured, all you have to do is publish new content regularly to automatically begin attracting more traffic.
If you need endless topics for posting content on your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training series here:
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 section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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