Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One, we 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 begin attracting new traffic is post content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase. We explained 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 website, and what to do if your site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic system using various plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could find yourself spending an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts prescribe. If you spend all of your time posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your website or blog, how does anything in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses 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.
Research conducted in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small 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 was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the figures would probably be higher.
- More than half of all businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online 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 budget, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on various social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other online properties.
Investing in business automation to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you ultimately have little to no control over (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate the traffic-getting process 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more time, budget, and efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, sites, solutions, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like YouTube, Facebook, Google.
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise 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 marketing channels individually can be 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 content one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get everything configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the process using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of plugins that can:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts to several social media networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in your publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that allows your visitors to interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, ability to use keywords in the username, the ability to add twitter names to comments, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
Visit this website to learn more about this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content to many traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of social sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), or if you want to learn more about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about, refer to this article:
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 System: Automated Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been set up and configured, all you then need to do to attract more web traffic is publish fresh content regularly.
If you need endless topics for posting content on your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click here:
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