Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish content regularly to automatically start driving traffic!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we looked at configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can drive traffic automatically to your site as you begin adding fresh content consistently.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you were to spend hours checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted 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 per week on social media (the rest 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 figures would probably 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider 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 Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. 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 real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage 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 increasing availability of many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time 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 strongly recommend staying away from all black hat websites, techniques, software, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is not to manipulate online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites frequented by your target audience.
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 online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one at a time is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving strategy 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social 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, expertly configure things as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate various processes using plugins such as 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 look now at some plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social sites.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displayed in the post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your site users engage with your website, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, adding twitter usernames to comments, and ability to use keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this website to learn more about using this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content to dozens of online platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many social platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more details about this plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article about social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. For more info, see this article:
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: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you have to do then to automatically attract new web traffic is publish content consistently.
If you need help coming up with ideas for posting content on your website, we recommend subscribing to our FREE 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 section of the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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