Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically drive web traffic!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase of the automation blueprint. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website 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 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive web traffic automatically to your website.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on who you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you spend half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching 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 working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done 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 using 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 research was conducted today, the figures 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every 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 puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other 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 consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more of your budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula for automating the traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on,
- Invest most of your 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 recommend staying away from all black hat techniques, websites, solutions, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of using this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving strategy 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 site as described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones listed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your 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, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social media networks.)
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 account options in your post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like backlinks, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the username, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of using this powerful plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content automatically to many online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many authority websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, visit this site: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a detailed article listing a number of social media measurement tools that you may want to check out. For more information, go here:
The above are just a few 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you need to do is post web content consistently to automatically attract more traffic organically.
We have created a complete email training series designed to help you come up with limitless content ideas for posting to your website or blog:
Once you have expertly 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 series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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