Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered 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 or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do to automatically start generating new traffic is post fresh content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of the blueprint. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase of this blueprint.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various plugins that can drive web traffic automatically to your website or blog just by adding web content regularly.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could end up investing a couple of hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spend half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, 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 in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 research was done today, the figures would most likely be significantly 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small 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 areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, time, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, 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 can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of so many new channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more of your budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other businesses (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting 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 Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 your budget on,
- Invest most of your efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, solutions, sites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article series is not to game online services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites visited 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 many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 WordPress site as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure your site settings as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins like the ones listed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Distribute content to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other websites
Jetpack
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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social media accounts.)
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 settings in your Publish section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter handles to comments, social enticements for content-sharing, using keywords in the name, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this 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 campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article where we explore many social media measurement tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here for more information:
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: Automated Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then is add content on a regular basis to automatically drive web traffic.
We have created a complete email email-based training course aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content for posting to your website or blog:
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 article in the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article series, 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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