Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this series, we described the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add web content on a regular basis to drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of the automation blueprint. We helped you understand 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 site was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discuss configuring the system.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 we explain how to configure all the settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we will discuss ways to automate the traffic-generation process with WordPress plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which expert you get your advice from, you could end up trying to spend an hour a day (or more) promoting your business on social media, as well as running your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Many business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you spend hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s also sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least six hours each week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed that used social media 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 conducted today, the numbers would most likely 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.
(Businesses spend more time each year 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 areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time marketing and promoting 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 Pinterest. These companies often will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of hundreds of new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners, especially for those with limited budgets, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should 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 ignoring the benefits of building content on 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 formula that allows you to automate the traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 marketing channels you should focus more of your 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 recommend avoiding black hat tools, sites, strategies, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Google.
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t need to involve using black hat techniques!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited resources, time, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to services one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not use this method 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as shown in Part Two. Then, expertly configure everything as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then connect all of the dots using plugins such as the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a number of plugins that can help:
- Post content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS feeds to other blogs
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 loads of useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social media sites.)
After all settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically syndicated online.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress commenting feature allows your blog readers to engage with your web site, post comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions as part of an online community.
You can enhance the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the name, backlinks, social enticements for sharing content, and the ability to add twitter usernames to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and visitors and improve user engagement on your web site.)
For more details about this plugin, visit the plugin website:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a WordPress plugin that lets you drip-feed your content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to many online platforms)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate your content to over 30 social platforms, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Diigo, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Gett, etc.
To learn more about using this WordPress plugin, go here: Social Link Machine
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 created a comprehensive article listing many social media measurement tools and technologies that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business, etc, see what online conversations are taking place that can affect your business,etc. More information:
The above are just a few examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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: Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your website and plugins expertly configured and set up, all you then need to do to attract new web traffic is post web content on a consistent basis.
We have created a complete email email-based training course designed to help you come up with unlimited content for posting to your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Section 4
To keep reading, click here:
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum
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