Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your site using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to generate traffic is publish great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we look at the setup phase. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase of the blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this article, we look at ways to automate traffic generation using plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners simply lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise doing. If you were to spend most of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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.
Research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This use of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and marketing budgets and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever 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 and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more budget, efforts, and your time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more efforts, time, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset 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 urge that you stay away from all black hat software, methods, sites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites 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 recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving strategy 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 your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online 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 site as shown in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins like the ones listed in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your content automatically to several social sites.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displays in your post publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically distributed online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that allows your site users to interact with your web site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing your content, using keywords in the user name, backlinks, and the ability to add twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate your content to over 30 online websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online websites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many online websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Folkd, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit the plugin site 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 actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article listing a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here for more details:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 System: Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins set up and configured, all you have to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to automatically start driving traffic.
If you need great topics for posting content on your site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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