Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
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 web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to begin bringing traffic is publish web content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase of the blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get new visitors automatically to your site.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could end up investing a couple of hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you spend all of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures would probably be even 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. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on need 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 have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (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 promote and market your business on?
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 method that lets you automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget 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 recommend avoiding black hat strategies, tools, sites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game online services or flaunt 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 marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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, most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually is very 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online properties using RSS
- Automatically import content (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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones shown 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-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other sites 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 new content using a 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 the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various social media networks.)
After all plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displayed in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, 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.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about using this great plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many authority websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. For more details, go here:
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 Automation System: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do to begin attracting traffic is publish great content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading about this topic, click here:
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