Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically start attracting traffic is add fresh content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get visitors automatically to your site.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which expert you talk to, you could end up spending 1-2 hours per day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you spend all of your time checking LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was conducted today, the numbers would probably 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other equally important 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 thing to consider 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 Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites can make decisions that affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (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 formula that lets you automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website 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 efforts, budget, 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 strongly urge that you stay away from all black hat tools, websites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article series is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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, most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different services one by one is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this time-saving 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:
- Automatically distribute content to social 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on various social media accounts.)
After all plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displayed in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
For more details about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your site users to interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing content, adding twitter handles to comments, SEO backlinks, using keywords in the name. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you drip-feed content to many social sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content to dozens of authority websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many social websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing many social media monitoring tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. Go here to learn more:
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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins configured and set up, all you need to do to automatically begin attracting traffic is add web content on a regular basis.
If you need help coming up with great topics for posting content on your website or blog, 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 addressed in the next section of our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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