Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 of this series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained 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 publish great content on a regular basis to automatically begin attracting web traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at configuring the system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help drive new traffic automatically to your site whenever you begin posting new content consistently.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour every day (or more) posting content on social media while also running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many small businesses 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 advise. If you spend most of your time checking LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Image source: NFIB)
Many business owners 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 stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half 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 figures 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small 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 important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many 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 promoting and marketing your business on a number of social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies can and will make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating systems and process to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should you invest more time, budget, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method for automating the traffic-getting 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat websites, tools, techniques, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series 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 frequented 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 businesses lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to different channels, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach like this 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 services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services 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 WordPress website as described in Part Two. Then, get it configured as shown in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generation plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part 3.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on various social media accounts.)
After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in your publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Go here for more information about this handy plugin: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your blog readers engage with your website, post comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a number of third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit the plugin site:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 online sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of social platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Visit this website to learn more about this handy plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), or to learn more about social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about, refer to this article:
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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to generate web traffic is publish fresh content regularly.
If you need help coming up with topics for content that you can post on your website, then subscribe to our email training series 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 WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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