Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-generation process using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending most of your time checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how can anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the other half 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 done today, the numbers 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.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget 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 social websites, 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 sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of so many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you focus more efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other people (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on 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 method that lets you automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, methods, solutions, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, many businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress website as shown in Part 2. Then, get it all configured as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones listed below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 great functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to 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 …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options appear in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature allows your site users to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in 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 around.
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 social enticements for sharing your content, adding twitter names to comments, using keywords in the user name, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they enter their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and visitors and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit this site to learn more about the benefits of this great plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to dozens of social websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of online sites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this plugin: SocialLinkMachine
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 tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about here:
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 Automation Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you have to do to automatically start attracting web traffic is publish great content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your web site, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on content marketing here:
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 covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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