Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically start driving traffic is post content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation process. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which business marketing expert you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spent hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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 conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each 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 research was conducted today, the numbers would probably be significantly higher.
- More than half of all 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 are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budget, and time and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites can make decisions that can significantly impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since 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 small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more of your efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting 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 Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic generation 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 urge you to avoid using black hat solutions, sites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, YouTube, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and 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 business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different services one by one is extremely 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, configure things as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins like the ones discussed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to several social sites.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displays in the Publish 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 new content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting feature allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like adding twitter handles to comments, social enticements for sharing content, using keywords in the username, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about the benefits of this great plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 online websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to many traffic-generating sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 online platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this powerful plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about here:
The above are just some 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is add web content regularly to bring more traffic.
If you need help coming up with topics for content that you can post on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
***
"Learning WordPress has been a huge stumbling block for me. I've been looking for something that covers absolutely everything but doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Thank you so much ... you have just provided me with what I have been looking for! Truly appreciated!" - Tanya
***