Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One, 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 begin bringing more web traffic is publish content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we focus on the setup phase. 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 website, and what to do if your existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we will discuss ways to automate traffic generation with plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could find yourself spending an hour or two (or more) per day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending hours checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time just 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 make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each 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 usage 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 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time 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 can and will make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process 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 many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you invest more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic generation 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated web 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 you to avoid using black hat software, techniques, sites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means 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 services individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving strategy like 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 WordPress website as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins like the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generating plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, 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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in the Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically syndicated online.)
For more details about this plugin, visit this site: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your visitors engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the user name, social enticements for sharing your content, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate content to over 30 online sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of social websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about using this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc. Go here to learn more:
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 Automation System: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you have to do then to automatically begin attracting new web traffic is publish new content on a consistent basis.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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