Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post new content on a consistent basis to automatically begin bringing traffic!)
In Part Two, we focus on critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website is built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation blueprint.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we will look at ways to automate the traffic system using a number of WordPress plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you were to spend half a day checking LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would you get anything else in your business done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many 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 remain 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 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 research was done today, the figures would probably be even 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time and many business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies can make decisions that impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budget. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more efforts, budget, and time 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 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 Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate the web traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this method, 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 recommend avoiding black hat methods, sites, tools, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites 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, many small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to different services one at a time is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic-Getting Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a number of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack Plugin
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 loads of great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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 a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to various social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displayed in the publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content will be automatically distributed online.)
Visit this site for more information about using this powerful plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting feature lets your visitors interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they like, +1, or tweet your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin website for more information about the benefits of this great plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating sites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate and drip-feed your content automatically to many traffic-generating sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to over 30 online platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
For more details about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article listing a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. To learn more, go here:
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 Automation Blueprint: Content Syndication Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you have to do then is add web content consistently to automatically generate more traffic organically.
We have created a complete email course designed to help you come up with unlimited content for your web site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as you can. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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