Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part 1 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 site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically attract new traffic is add fresh content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the traffic automation process. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section, we will discuss ways to automate traffic generation using WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you talk to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours each day (or more) posting content on social media.
Most small business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are recommending. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours just 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 six or more hours per 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 conducted 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider 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 LinkedIn. These companies can and will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, 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 Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic generation 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and 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 recommend avoiding black hat techniques, software, websites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is 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 visited 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 small businesses lack the time, 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 budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution using plugins like the ones shown in the next section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other websites via RSS feeds
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, 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 loads of great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details in your publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post is automatically syndicated online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in 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 community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a number of third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing your content, the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, using keywords in the username, and search-indexable backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your web site.)
Visit this site to learn more about this handy plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed your content, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate your content automatically to many online platforms)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating platforms, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Visit the plugin site to learn more about this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article listing a number of social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. For more information, go here:
The above are just a few 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: Automated Content Distribution Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you then need to do to automatically begin attracting new traffic is publish new content regularly.
If you need endless content ideas for your web site, we recommend subscribing to our email training series on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is covered in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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