Welcome to Part 4 of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn your site into an automated web traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is add web content regularly to automatically attract traffic!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We explain 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 existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we will discuss ways to automate traffic generation with WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing experts you talk to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many small business owners 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 recommend. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in addition to planning and writing articles for your website or blog, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow 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 businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the numbers would probably be even 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 are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budgets and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you focus more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, 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 we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more budget, time, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 strategies, websites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites used 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 businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different channels is very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins such as the ones shown below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part 3.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your content automatically to various social media networks.)
After configuring all account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options show in the Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your site users interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they like, plus1, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate content to many online websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content to over 30 online sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of authority websites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Deviantart, Linkagogo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article on social media measurement tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some 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 Automation System: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your WordPress site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you need to do is publish content on a regular basis to automatically start attracting traffic organically.
If you need great content ideas for your website, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly 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 Automation System series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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