Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and 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 start attracting web traffic is add web 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 things 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 how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section of the article series, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-generation process with WordPress plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more each day posting content on social media while also managing your business, your content and your online presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic 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.
Marketing research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the numbers would probably be even 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 spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, 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 I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more time, efforts, and 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 strategies, tools, sites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to individual channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate your 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 Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, 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 useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displays in your Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about using this plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that allows your site users to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit this site:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 online sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to many authority websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 online websites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. For more details:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 Automation System: Automated Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and configured, all you have to do then is publish great content regularly to automatically start driving web traffic.
We have created an entire email course aimed at helping you never run out of great content ideas for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 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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