WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Part 4 (Automation)

Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using WordPress.

So far, we have covered the following in this series:

In Part One, 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 blog, all you have to do to start generating more traffic is add content on a consistent basis!)

In Part 2, we look at the setup phase of this process. We help you understand the best way to start 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 website has been built using WordPress.

(In Part 2 we show you where to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)

In Part 3, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation system.

Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …

(In Part Three we show you how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)

In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate traffic to your website using WordPress plugins.

Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?

Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up spending an hour each day (or more) posting content on social media while also trying to manage your business, your content and your web presence.

Many small business owners simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are advising. If you are spending hours posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how will you get anything else in your business done?

(Small business owners spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)

Many business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.

A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:

• 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used 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 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 source: VerticalResponse)

As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …

(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)

Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social sites, 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 make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other online accounts.

Automating processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:

• Which of these marketing channels should you focus more time, efforts, and budget on?
• Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
• Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?

The Benefits Of Automating The Web Traffic Generation With WordPress

What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your web traffic generation process with WordPress.

With this method, 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 channels,
• Determine which channels you should invest more of your time, efforts, and your budget on,
• Invest most of your time 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 methods, sites, tools, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, etc..

(Web traffic automation does not have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)

What we are focusing here is not to game web 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 marketing 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 that most businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.

So, instead of posting content to each different channel, which is extremely time-consuming …

(Posting content to different services individually is extremely time-consuming!)

Why not opt for this time-saving method 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.

You can:

• Distribute content automatically to social services and social 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 site as shown in Part Two. Then, configure it as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes with plugins.

The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …

WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Generation Plugins

Let’s take a brief look at a few plugins that can:

• Syndicate content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
• Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
• Post content automatically via RSS to other websites

Jetpack 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 WordPress plugin like JetPack.

Download URL: https://jetpack.com/

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.

After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part Three …

(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)

Next, activate the Publicize feature …

(Jetpack – Publicize feature)

You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …

(Distribute your posts to various social accounts.)

After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.

Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …

(Publicize account options in your post publishing box.)

Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …

(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)

Visit this website to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack Plugin

CommentLuv

(CommentLuv)

WordPress has a native commenting function that allows your site users to interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of a social community.

You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature using third-party commenting plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.

For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, +1, or like your post. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click submit.

(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)

Go here for more details about the benefits of this plugin:

• CommentLuv PRO WordPress Plugin

Social Link Machine

(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)

Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …

(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content to many traffic-generating websites)

With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to over 30 social websites, including:

• Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
• Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
• Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
• Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
• PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.

Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this powerful plugin: SocialLinkMachine

Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools that are worth knowing about. Go here to learn more:

• Social Media Resources For WordPress Users

The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.

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:

• How To Kickstart The WordPress Traffic Automation Process To Your Website Or Blog

WordPress Traffic System: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary

Once you have your site and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you then need to do to bring web traffic is post web content regularly.

If you need great content ideas for your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on growing your business with content marketing here:

Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.

This is the end of Part Four

To read the rest of this article series, click here:

• Website Traffic Blueprint Part Five – A Complete Guide To Generating More Web Traffic Automatically

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