Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add new content on a regular basis to drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed critical setup decisions. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things 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 website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we focused on configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we look at ways to automate traffic to your website using various WordPress plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself investing an hour a day (or more) posting content on social media in addition to trying to run your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many small businesses simply lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend. If you were to spend hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 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 survey was done today, the numbers would most likely be significantly 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, time, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and post 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 since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not control (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your 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 marketing channels you should focus more budget, time, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat strategies, sites, tools, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game online services or bypass 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 used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to individual channels, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to services individually is very time-consuming!)
Why not do 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) to other blogs and web 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 shown in Part Two. Then, configure everything as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other sites via RSS feeds
Jetpack
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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many great functions.
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)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Publicize your content to various social networks.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options displays in the post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they will be automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides you with an automated and hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature lets your site users engage with your website, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature using a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like backlinks, adding twitter usernames to comments, social enticements for content-sharing, and ability to use keywords in the user name. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are entering their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this handy plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 online websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to over 30 social sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of social websites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here for more information about using this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have created a detailed article where we explore over 30 social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 System: Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been set up and configured, all you then need to do to drive web traffic is publish web content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you never run out of great content for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in the WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To continue reading this article, click on the link below:
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"This is an awesome training series. I have a pretty good understanding of WordPress already, but this is helping me to move somewhere from intermediate to advanced user!" - Kim Lednum
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