Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your site into an automated web traffic machine using WordPress.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your site …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to automatically attract more web traffic is add great content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase. We explained the best way to get started 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 two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at the configuration phase.
Here, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three we explain how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we will look at ways to automate traffic to your website using plugins.
Why Automate Your Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which experts you get your advice from, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you are spending most of your time posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Image source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their time simply 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.
A study of small businesses conducted in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 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 research was done 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, budgets, and resources and many different business areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes 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 business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you focus more of your time, budget, and your efforts 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 ignoring the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
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 web traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more efforts, budget, and time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 staying away from all black hat solutions, methods, websites, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the policies and terms of service of services like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat techniques!)
The focus of this article series is not to manipulate web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from sites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that most business owners lack the time, resources and budget 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 limitations.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach 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 content once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content 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 WordPress website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, get it configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins such as the ones discussed in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic System – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generation WordPress plugins that can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (as described in Part Three.) …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media networks.)
After all of the account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in the post publishing area.)
Now, whenever 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 will be automatically distributed online.)
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The built-in WordPress commenting function allows your visitors to interact with your website or blog, post comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, with a 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 rewards like using keywords in the username, social enticements for sharing your content, the ability to add twitter names to comments, and backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about this handy plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to automatically syndicate content to over 30 authority websites, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to over 30 authority sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 social platforms, including:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Gett, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of this handy plugin, visit this website: Social LinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), or if you want to learn more about social media tracking tools that you may want to check out, see this article:
The above are just some examples of the many content distribution plugins that WordPress makes available.
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been set up and configured, all you then have to do is post content on a regular basis to begin bringing more web traffic.
If you need endless topics for posting content on your website, we recommend subscribing to our 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 WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click here:
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