WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Part 4 (Automation)

Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic generation machine using WordPress.

So far, we have covered the following in this series:

In Part 1 of this article series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated traffic …

(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically start generating new traffic is publish content consistently!)

In Part Two, we focused on critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your existing site was built using WordPress.

(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)

In Part Three, we discuss the configuration phase of the automation process.

In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …

(In Part 3 we show you how to configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)

In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive web traffic automatically to your site.

Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process

Depending on who you listen to, you could end up trying to spend a couple of hours or more every day promoting your business on social media in addition to trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.

Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts are recommending. If you were to spend hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?

(Small businesses spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)

Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.

A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:

• 43% of all businesses surveyed spent six or more 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 survey was conducted today, the numbers would most likely 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 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 pressure on businesses to prioritize their time on other important areas …

(Businesses with limited time, marketing budget, and resources and many business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)

One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, 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 someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.

Automating business systems and processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:

• Which of these channels do you invest more of your budget, time, and efforts on?
• Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, 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 Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress

What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.

With this strategy, you will be able to:

• Save time creating web content and social media,
• Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
• Determine which marketing channels you should invest more efforts, budget, 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat software, sites, techniques, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc..

(Web traffic automation doesn’t have to involve the use of black hat techniques!)

What we are focusing here is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites that your target audience frequents.

An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System

We’ve just seen that many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts prescribe. 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 different channels is extremely time-consuming!)

Why not use a smarter, time-saving strategy 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.

You can:

• Automatically distribute content to social channels and 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 do all of this?

Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure it as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots with plugins like the ones discussed below.

The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …

WordPress Traffic Automation System – Plugins

Let’s take a brief look at a few traffic-generating plugins that can help to:

• Distribute content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
• Post comments automatically to other blogs
• Distribute content via RSS feeds to other sites

Jetpack

You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Google+, 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 useful features.

After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part Three …

(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)

Next, activate the Publicize feature …

(Activate the Publicize feature)

Configure this section to share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and more …

(Distribute your posts to various social media accounts.)

After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.

Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …

(Publicize account settings show in the Publish section.)

Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …

(As soon as content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)

This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.

CommentLuv

(CommentLuv)

WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your visitors engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.

You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with third-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.

For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro 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 content. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included with their comment when they click the submit button.

(CommentLuv can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site.)

To learn more about this great plugin, visit the plugin site:

• CommentLuv PRO – WordPress Plugin

Social Link Machine

(Social LinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)

Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you automatically drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …

(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority platforms)

With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of online websites, like:

• Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
• Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
• Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
• Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
• Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.

Go here to learn more about the benefits of this powerful plugin: Social LinkMachine

Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a comprehensive article about social media monitoring tools and technologies that are worth knowing about here:

• 29 Media Tools For Business Owners

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:

• How To Kickstart The WordPress Traffic Automation Process To Your Website Or Blog

WordPress Traffic System: Content Distribution Process – Summary

Once you have your site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post content consistently to generate traffic.

If you need endless content ideas for your website, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:

Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.

This is the end of Section Four

To read more, click on the link below:

• WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint Part Five – How To Get More Web Traffic For Your Business

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