Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic generating machine 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 website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to begin attracting new web traffic is add new content regularly!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase. We help 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 website, and what to do if your website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on configuring WordPress.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we discuss ways to automate traffic to your website using WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing experts you talk to, you could end up trying to spend 1-2 hours every day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you are spending half your day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 even 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 are spending 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 focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social 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 Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Investing in business automation 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 business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your budget, efforts, and 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat websites, strategies, software, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is 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 increase your exposure online to websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services one by one is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving method 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and web 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 WordPress website as described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other websites via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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 …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to several social media networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displays in the publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting system that lets your site users interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the user name, social enticements for content-sharing, backlinks, and adding twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many authority platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to dozens of online websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about using this great plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. Go here to learn more about this:
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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you then need to do is publish web content consistently to automatically begin bringing new web traffic.
We have created an entire email course designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading this article, click here:
***
"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)
***