Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to start attracting web traffic is post web content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We helped 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 site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we will look at ways to automate traffic generation with different plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour each day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending hours posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (most of the other 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 figures would most likely be 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, resources, and time and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can and will make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more time, budget, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other people (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 marketing channels you should invest more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 you to avoid using black hat software, techniques, sites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of services like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites used 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, many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to each different marketing channel, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be very 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 described in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate various processes with plugins such as the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 loads of great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social accounts.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options appear in your post publishing area.)
Now, whenever 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 distributed online.)
For more details about using this plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that lets your blog readers interact with your website, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using third-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for content sharing, using keywords in the user name, SEO backlinks, and adding twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about using this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 online sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about using this great plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article listing many social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Go here to learn more:
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: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add fresh content consistently to start generating more web traffic organically.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you come up with endless content ideas for posting to your site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading this article, click here:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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