Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add fresh content regularly to automatically start driving 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 existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can drive new traffic automatically to your site as you begin to add web content.
Why Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours or more every day posting content on social media, as well as trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you spent most of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time trying to keep 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.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (the other half spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the figures 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites can make decisions that can significantly 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 (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more budget, time, and efforts 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 your own domain?
- 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 show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset 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 recommend avoiding black hat sites, methods, solutions, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. 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 individual channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use a smarter, time-saving approach like this 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:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part 2. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins like the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other websites
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn 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 your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your content to various social media accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings in your Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature allows your visitors to interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing content, adding twitter usernames to comments, ability to use keywords in the name, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about using this great plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to many social sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many authority sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
For more information about the benefits of this powerful plugin, visit the plugin site: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a detailed article where we explore many social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. To learn more, go here:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 System: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you then need to do to automatically begin attracting new traffic is publish great content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your website or blog, then subscribe to our FREE email training series on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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