Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add content on a regular basis to automatically begin bringing traffic!)
In Part 2, we focused on the setup phase. We helped 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 site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you were to spend all of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping 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.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was conducted today, the figures would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can and will make decisions that impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more of your time, efforts, and your 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 neglecting 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, 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 marketing channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your 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 urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, solutions, sites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one at a time can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and web 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other blogs via RSS feeds
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, 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 many useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
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 configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in your Publish box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides you with an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your visitors engage with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
For more details about the benefits of this powerful plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate content to many traffic-generating platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to over 30 social websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 online platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin, go here: 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), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about here:
The above are just some 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: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and configured, all you then have to do is post content regularly to drive more web traffic organically.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content for your website:
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 System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
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