Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post web content regularly to generate web traffic!)
In Part 2, we look at critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to start 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive web traffic automatically to your site whenever you begin to add fresh content on a regular basis.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media, as well as running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you spent half a day posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (the other half 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 done today, the figures would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all 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.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote 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 formula for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 marketing channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, tools, sites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to game online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites 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, 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 doing this …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach like the one shown below 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones discussed in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media accounts.)
After all 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 box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new content will be automatically syndicated online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your site users engage with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, social enticements for sharing your content, and using keywords in the name. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about using this plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed content to dozens of online sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content to over 30 online sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of authority platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
For more details about this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out. To learn more, 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 Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you need to do to attract more web traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis.
If you need endless content ideas for your web site, then subscribe 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 covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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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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