Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to drive more web traffic is post great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We explain 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 existing website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss the configuration phase of this process.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we explain how to set up various plugins that can bring new visitors automatically to your site simply by adding fresh content.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could end up investing an hour every day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you are spending most of your time checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six 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 use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 time, marketing budget, and resources and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business processes to leverage time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which channels should you invest more of your efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, 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 method that allows you to 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, tools, websites, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to marketing channels individually, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, configure everything as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate the content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, 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 functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social media sites.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details show in the post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically syndicated online.)
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your site users engage with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this great plugin, visit this site:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content automatically to over 30 online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of traffic-generating platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing a number of social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about. Go here for more info:
The above are just a few 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 Automation System: Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically begin bringing web traffic is post content on a consistent basis.
If you need help coming up with ideas for posting content on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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