Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post fresh content consistently to automatically begin bringing web traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the blueprint. 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 site, and what to do if your existing website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress web site on your domain)
In Part 3, we discuss the configuration phase of this process.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the article series, we will discuss ways to automate traffic generation with plugins.
Why Automating The Traffic-Getting Process Makes Sense
Depending on which expert you listen to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour or more each day posting content 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 prescribe. If you are spending all of your time checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (the other half 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 figures would probably be even higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more creating a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources and many areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
Another thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own virtual real estate and distribute your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in automation to leverage time and increase productivity 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 small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels should 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, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on 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 strategy that lets you automate the web 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 web marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should invest more budget, time, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, websites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is to show you how to 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, many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of using this approach …
(Posting content to services one by one 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media channels and 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 website or blog as described in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as shown in Part 3. After all this is in place, you can then automate these processes using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at some examples of WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content to other sites via RSS
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, 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 useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature on Jetpack)
You can share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social accounts.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings displayed in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically shared online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your visitors to engage with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a third-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing your content, ability to use keywords in the username, the ability to add twitter names to comments, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Visit the plugin site for more information about this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a plugin that lets you automatically syndicate content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many social websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
For more information about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore a number of social media measurement tools that will help you identify new business opportunities, track competitor activity, see what online conversations are taking place that affect your business,etc. For more details, visit this page:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Syndication Phase – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been set up and expertly configured, all you have to do then is publish content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting web traffic.
If you need topics for content that you can post on your website, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series on content marketing here:
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 series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
***
"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)
***