Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically 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 described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is publish fresh content on a regular basis to generate more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to start 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 where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can bring new traffic automatically to your website just by adding fresh content.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you spent hours posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how could you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain 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:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per 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 conducted today, the figures would most likely be significantly higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating 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 marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budget and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other 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 don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies can and will make decisions that impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget 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 domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the web traffic generation 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and budget 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat sites, software, techniques, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Pinterest, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of posting content to individual marketing channels, which is extremely 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 site as explained in Part 2. Then, get it configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins like the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically to other web properties via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your posts automatically to several social accounts.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings in the post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new content is automatically shared online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that allows your visitors to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for content-sharing, backlinks, ability to use keywords in the username, and the ability to add twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically syndicate your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of authority sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media tracking tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc. To learn more about this go here:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 System: Automated Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is post new content regularly to generate more traffic organically.
If you need great content ideas for your website or blog, 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 the process. This step is explained in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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