Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we 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 automatically begin bringing new traffic is post great content regularly!)
In Part Two, we look at critical setup decisions. We help you understand 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 existing website is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we will look at ways to automate the traffic system with plugins.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which business marketing gurus you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 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 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 significantly 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 each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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, strategies, solutions, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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 most businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many 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 individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy like the one shown below 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) automatically 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other websites
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 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 a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content on various social accounts.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings displays in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically shared online.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that lets your visitors interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, tweet, or +1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your website.)
For more information about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many social websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 authority websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin: 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 distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article listing many social media tracking tools and technologies that you may want to check out. Go here to learn more:
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 Automation Blueprint: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then to start attracting web traffic is add web content on a consistent basis.
If you need great content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
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 article in our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
***
"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
***