Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive visitors automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish new content regularly to start driving traffic!)
In Part Two, we looked at the setup phase. We helped you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site was built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we discussed configuring the system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we look at ways to automate the traffic system with WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on who you get your advice from, you could find yourself investing an hour each day (or more) posting content on social media.
Many small business owners lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts advise. If you spent hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how would anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours each week on social media (the other half spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same survey was done today, the numbers would probably 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, time, and resources 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 promoting and marketing your business on a number of 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 LinkedIn. These sites can make decisions that affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of hundreds of new channels for promoting and marketing a business creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you focus more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, 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 method for automating your 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 channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset 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 urge you to avoid using black hat tools, websites, methods, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not need to involve the use of black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article is not to game web 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 increase your exposure online to websites visited by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts are prescribing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be very time-consuming!)
Why not do 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 one-time, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 of this done?
Simple … first, set up your WordPress site as explained in Part 2. Then, expertly configure it as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at some examples of traffic-generation plugins that can help to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content via RSS feeds to other online properties
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus and more as soon as you publish your content using a plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Publicize your content to several social media networks.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options appear in your Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared on every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
For more details about this plugin, go here: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system lets your site users interact with your web site, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress default 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 them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the user name, search-indexable backlinks, adding twitter names to comments, and social enticements for sharing content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, visit the plugin site:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that lets you syndicate your content to many authority websites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content automatically to many authority websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. To learn more about this go here:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and syndicating 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 Automation System: Content Distribution Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you need to do then to begin bringing more traffic is publish new content regularly.
We have created a complete email training series designed to help you never run out of great content for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read the rest of this article series, click on the link below:
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