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 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically generate web traffic is post great content regularly!)
In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on the configuration phase of this blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can bring new visitors automatically to your website or blog as you begin to add fresh content consistently.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on who you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour or more a day posting content on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you were to spend hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each 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 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budgets and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest 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, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting 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 we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and 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 techniques, sites, tools, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game web services or bypass 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 marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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 businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many 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, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution using plugins such as the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other sites
Jetpack
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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social accounts.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings appear in the Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system lets your blog readers interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this great plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of authority platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate your content to dozens of authority platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many authority sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
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 written a detailed article where we explore over 30 social media monitoring tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. See this page to learn more:
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 Blueprint: Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then is post content on a regular basis to attract more web traffic organically.
If you need endless content ideas for your site, then subscribe to our email training course 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 addressed in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To keep reading, click here:
***
"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
***