Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add web content regularly to begin attracting more web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on 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 things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive visitors automatically to your site.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which online marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more a day posting content on social media, as well as managing your business, your content and your web presence.
Most small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you were to spend half a day checking Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business ever get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per 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 done today, the figures would most likely be 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budgets, and resources and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These sites can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting 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-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more efforts, time, and your budget 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 recommend avoiding black hat software, strategies, websites, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, YouTube, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article series is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to individual channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure everything as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 loads of 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 …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content on several social media accounts.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings appear in your post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature lets your site users interact with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a 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 usernames to comments, backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, and using keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and web traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit this site:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate your content, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to many traffic-generating platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 social websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this powerful plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), go here to learn more about social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc:
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 Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post content on a consistent basis to automatically start attracting web traffic.
If you need topics for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe to our 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 covered in the next section of the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article series, click here:
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