Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive traffic automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add fresh content consistently to automatically begin bringing new web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase. We help 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 website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings 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 website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we discuss ways to automate your traffic using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners 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 doing. If you spent all of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six 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 done today, the numbers would probably 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budget, and resources and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 method for automating your web traffic generation process 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 channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 recommend staying away from all black hat tools, websites, techniques, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to services one by one, which is extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to different channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this method 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as shown in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of traffic-generating plugins that can:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media accounts.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content is automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting system lets your site users interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or plus1 your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can 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.)
For more details about the benefits of using this plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed content to many social platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many authority sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
For more details about this WordPress plugin, visit this website: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), go here for a detailed article about social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about:
The above are just a few 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 System: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you need to do to automatically attract new web traffic is post great content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is addressed in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To keep reading, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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