Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress web site, all you have to do is add content on a regular basis to automatically start driving traffic!)
In Part Two, 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 everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at the configuration phase of the automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we explain how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive new traffic automatically to your site simply by posting new content.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two every day (or more) posting content on social media, as well as trying to run your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are prescribing. If you are spending half your day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours per week on social media (the rest 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 numbers 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These sites often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more of your time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 Your Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this method, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset 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 that you stay away from all black hat strategies, websites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, budget, and time.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one by one can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this 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:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and 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 this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few WordPress plugins that can help:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
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 features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your 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 …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content to several social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account settings show in the publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically distributed online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that allows your visitors to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party commenting plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the name, social enticements for sharing content, the ability to add twitter names to comments, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the website of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit this website:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate content to dozens of social platforms, build backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to many authority platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 online platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this handy plugin: SocialLinkMachine
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 over 30 social media tracking tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that could affect your business,etc. More info:
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 Automation System: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do is add fresh content on a consistent basis to start generating new traffic organically.
If you need endless topics for content that you can post on your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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