Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to turn a site into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to begin bringing web traffic is add new content on a regular basis!)
In Part 2, we discuss critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed configuring WordPress.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can get new visitors automatically to your site as you begin publishing fresh content on a consistent basis.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could find yourself spending 1-2 hours or more every day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending half your day checking Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours 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.
Marketing research done by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours each week on social media (the rest 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 conducted today, the figures would probably be 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 each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to leverage time is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budget, and resources. For example:
- Which channels should you focus more budget, efforts, and time 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 neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate the traffic generation 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 online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and budget 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat techniques, websites, software, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t need to involve using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this series of articles is not to game online services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites 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 businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limitations.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to services individually can be 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and web 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 WordPress website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, configure things as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate various processes using plugins such as the ones discussed in the section 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 brief look at some examples of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other websites
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your content automatically on various social media accounts.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options in the post publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your new content is automatically shared online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting function that allows your blog readers to engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using 3rd-party commenting plugins that integrate with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they tweet, plus1, or like your post. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social Link Machine is a plugin that lets you syndicate content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content to dozens of social sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to dozens of online websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Kippt, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this great plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media measurement tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that affect your business,etc here:
The above are just a few 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been set up and configured, all you have to do to automatically drive more web traffic is publish fresh content regularly.
We have created an entire email email-based training course aimed at helping you come up with unlimited content for your website:
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 article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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