Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated web traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin bringing new web traffic is add content consistently!)
In Part 2, we discuss the setup phase. We explain 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 website, and what to do if your existing site is built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part Three, we look at important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that can affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In this section of the series, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help drive traffic automatically to your website.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could find yourself investing 1-2 hours per day (or more) posting content on social media in addition to trying to run your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many businesses simply lack the time, resources and budget to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spend hours checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how can anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic source: NFIB)
Many business owners spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and make sales in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using social media 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 research was conducted today, the figures would probably be 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 spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and marketing budget and many different business areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social sites, 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 and will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Investing in business automation to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, resources, and marketing budget. For example:
- Which channels do you invest more time, efforts, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your budget, time, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat websites, techniques, tools, and anything designed to “game” or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section how most businesses 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 work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different services individually can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving strategy 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 social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones shown in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few plugins that can be used to:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other web properties via RSS feeds
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish your content using a WordPress plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, 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 …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social networks.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize settings appear in the Publish area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as posts are published, they are automatically distributed online.)
The Jetpack plugin provides a hands-free, automated way to create more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting system that lets your site users interact with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a number of 3rd-party plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like using keywords in the name, social enticements for sharing content, backlinks, and adding twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this plugin:
Social Link Machine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate content to dozens of social sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate content to dozens of online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to dozens of social sites, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have created a comprehensive article where we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth checking out and knowing about. To learn more, go here:
The above are just some 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do to start generating new traffic is publish new content regularly.
We have created a complete email training series aimed at helping you come up with limitless content ideas for posting to your site:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is covered in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
To continue reading this article, 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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