Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to generate traffic is publish web content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained 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 site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we look at ways to automate the traffic-getting process with plugins.
Why You Should Automate Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.
Many business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you spent half a day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours per week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would probably be higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online 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 different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various 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 Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without 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 post your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more efforts, time, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, software, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of services like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not have to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services individually 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – 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 accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social media accounts.)
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 options in the post publishing area.)
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 posts are published, they will be automatically syndicated online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your post. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit this website to learn more about using this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 social websites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content to dozens of online platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of authority platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit this website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article listing over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add great content consistently to begin bringing more web traffic.
We have created a complete email course aimed at helping you never run out of great content ideas for posting to your web site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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