Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically generate traffic is publish great content regularly!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. 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 site, and what to do if your existing site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using various WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, human 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 spend half your day checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses 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 (the other half of businesses surveyed using 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 conducted today, the figures would most likely 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 consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process 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 increasing availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more of your budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have no control over (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on 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 show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 marketing channels you should focus more budget, time, and efforts 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 that you stay away from all black hat solutions, sites, strategies, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section how most businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means 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 time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to each different channel, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach like 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 your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of plugins that can help to:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, 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 many 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 the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content to several social media sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in the publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
This is a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your site users to interact with your website, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with 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 plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for sharing your content, adding twitter names to comments, and using keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here for more details about using this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to over 30 social platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many traffic-generating platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article listing several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Go here for more info:
The above are just some 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 Blueprint: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is add fresh content regularly to drive traffic.
We have created an entire email series aimed at helping you never run out of content for your site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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"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)
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