Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS platform.
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 generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add great content on a consistent basis to automatically start driving traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various plugins that can bring traffic automatically to your website.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means 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 spend all of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each 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 was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the figures would probably 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, 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 share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more 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 web 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 recommend avoiding black hat software, websites, techniques, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites visited 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 small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend 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 marketing channels individually is 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, configure things as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
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 examples of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other web properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 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 Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to 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 account details displayed in the publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your site users interact with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve 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 your content, SEO backlinks, and ability to use keywords in the name. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you drip-feed your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate content automatically to many social websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of online sites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about the benefits of using this powerful plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore a number of social media monitoring tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. More info:
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: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and configured, all you need to do then is add great content on a regular basis to bring traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your site, then subscribe to our email training course on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To keep reading, click on the link below:
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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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