Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn a website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to start generating more traffic is add content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we look at critical setup decisions. We explain the best way to get started 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 existing website is built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we focused on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we will show you how to set up various plugins that can help bring traffic automatically to your website or blog when you begin adding content on a regular basis.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic Generation Process
Depending on who you talk to, you could end up spending a couple of hours each day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many business owners lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent most of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using 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 research was conducted today, the numbers would most likely be significantly 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 each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites can and will make decisions that affect your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Automating processes to save time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited resources, time, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which channels do you focus 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. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, 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 Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset and still benefit from other people’s marketing channels.
Many automated web 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 websites, methods, software, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and marketing efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one by one is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for this time-saving 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, expertly configure things as described in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some traffic-generating plugins that can:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 useful features.
After installing Jetpack, 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 a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Publicize your posts to several social accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details in your publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new posts are automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that allows your site users to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like using keywords in the user name, search-indexable backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, and the ability to add twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of using this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to automatically drip-feed content to over 30 online websites, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of social platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to dozens of social websites, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this powerful plugin: SocialLinkMachine
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 detailed article about social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating 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 Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins fully set up and expertly configured, all you need to do then to automatically bring traffic is publish content consistently.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content for posting to your site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read more, 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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