Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to create an automated traffic generating machine using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain 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 is publish great content regularly to begin bringing new traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We helped 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 site, and what to do if your website has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing gurus you talk to, you could end up spending an hour or two per 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 engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you were to spend half a day checking Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing content for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent six or more hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used 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 to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time 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 social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and your time 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, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 The Traffic Generation With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, sites, tools, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Pinterest, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
We’ve just seen that most small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this time-consuming approach …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate these processes with plugins like the ones discussed in the following section.
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 brief look at a few traffic-generating plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other websites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure the Jetpack plugin is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media networks.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options in your post publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit this website: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your site users engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a social community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like social enticements for sharing content, using keywords in the username, backlinks, and the ability to add twitter usernames to comments. 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 choose to include below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this plugin, visit this site:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate your content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content to over 30 social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many traffic-generating websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
For more details about using this plugin, visit this website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), go here to learn more about social media measurement tools that you may want to check out:
The above are just some 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:
WordPress Traffic Blueprint: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do then is add fresh content consistently to automatically attract more web traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your web site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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