Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically start attracting traffic is publish great content consistently!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase of the automation system. We helped you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing website 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 focus on the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this step, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help get new visitors automatically to your website or blog whenever you begin publishing fresh content.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on who you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more a day posting content on social media.
Most small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you spent most of your time posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business running is how most small business owners spend their working hours. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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 in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all 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 usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was conducted today, the numbers would probably 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.
(Small businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting your business on a number of social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These sites can and will make decisions that affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in business automation to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more of your 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. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you 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 channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more of your budget, efforts, and time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 sites, techniques, solutions, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing here is not to game online services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from 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 business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving approach like 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 content once, and automate your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones listed in the next section.
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 traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other websites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, 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 many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social media accounts.)
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 account settings in the publishing box.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature lets your blog readers engage with your website or blog, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with 3rd-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your website.)
To learn more about using this handy plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that lets you automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed your content automatically to many traffic-generating platforms)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of authority platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
Go here to learn more about this great plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore over 30 social media monitoring tools that you may want to check out. More information:
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 Syndication Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and configured, all you have to do to attract traffic is post web content consistently.
If you need endless content ideas for your web site, then subscribe to our email training course on content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, 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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