Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting new traffic is publish web content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to get started 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 site is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we will look at ways to automate your traffic using WordPress plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself investing a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending hours checking Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours 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 grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per 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 figures 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business 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 properties.
Investing in automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you invest more 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, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 invest more of your 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat sites, tools, techniques, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to 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, many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different services individually can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving method 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 media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and online 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 WordPress website as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other websites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content to various social sites.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new content is automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your site users to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the name, search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for sharing your content, and the ability to add twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your web site.)
For more details about this plugin, visit this website:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many online websites, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content to many online sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 authority sites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about using this handy plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), or to learn more about social media measurement tools that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc, refer to this article:
The above are just some 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 Automation Blueprint: Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically attract more web traffic is post content on a consistent basis.
If you need help coming up with great ideas for posting content on your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on content marketing here:
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 our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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