Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add great content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting new traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will look at ways to automate the traffic-getting process using various WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on which online marketing guru you get your advice from, you could end up spending 1-2 hours or more per day posting content on social media.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise doing. If you spend hours checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time simply 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.
Research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half 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 research was conducted today, the numbers 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more 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 equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies can make decisions that can significantly 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 virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, 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 Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more time, efforts, and 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 avoiding black hat solutions, sites, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as shown in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate the process with plugins such as the ones shown in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other websites via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
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 features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social accounts.)
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 settings displays in the Publish section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
For more details about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your visitors to engage with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a 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 plus1 your content. 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 after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many online sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to many traffic-generating sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Visit this page to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then to automatically start generating more web traffic is post new content on a regular basis.
If you need great content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series here:
Once you have expertly 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 series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click on the link below:
***
"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
***