Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish new content on a regular basis to bring more traffic!)
In Part Two, we focused on the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started 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 was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can help bring web traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which business marketing experts you talk to, you could end up spending an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you were to spend all of your time checking LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses 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 remain competitive and make sales 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 at least 6 hours per 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 most likely be significantly 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budget and many different 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 marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies can make decisions that impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Investing in automation to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth 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 of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate the traffic generation 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 invest more efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat websites, solutions, strategies, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but 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 get additional exposure online from 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, most small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to marketing channels individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do 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:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to various 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 details appear in the Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically shared online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system allows your visitors to engage with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using a number of 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate 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 website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, ability to use keywords in the name, social enticements for sharing your content, and the ability to add twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of online websites, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content automatically to many authority platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of online platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin site for more details about the benefits of using this powerful plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a comprehensive article on social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more about this:
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 System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been set up and configured, all you then have to do is post great content regularly to automatically begin bringing more web traffic.
If you need endless great ideas for content that you can post on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series 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 section of the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 4
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