Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to start generating web traffic is publish content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase. We explain 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 site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help get new traffic automatically to your website when you begin publishing new content consistently.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Many business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spend half your day checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Source: 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 grow in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media 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 survey was done today, the figures would probably be even 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of 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 areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, time, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of 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 YouTube. These companies can make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more of your budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have little to no control over (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, and your budget 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 sites, strategies, tools, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
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 get additional exposure online from websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels individually can be 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 one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins like the ones discussed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful features.
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 …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media networks.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in your publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your site users interact with your site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this handy plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate your content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more information about the benefits of using this handy plugin, visit this site: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore several social media monitoring tools that are worth knowing about. More information:
The above are just a few 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 System: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do to automatically generate traffic is post great content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing 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 WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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