Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part 1, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is post web content on a consistent basis to automatically start generating new traffic!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. 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 site, and what to do if your website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we looked at configuring the system.
Here, we configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part Four, we explain how to set up various plugins that can help drive web traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automating Your Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on who you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend a couple of hours each 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 lack the time, resources and financial means to run a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts prescribe. If you spent most of your time checking Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic: NFIB)
Many businesses spend most of their time trying to keep their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s 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:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent 6 or more hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media 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 done 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 consumed the most time online.
(Businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time on online marketing as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, time, and budget and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on a number of social websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on rented real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can have complete control of your own virtual real estate and publish your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business processes to leverage time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, budgets, and time. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more of your budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that allows you to automate the 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 online marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more budget, time, and efforts on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts building your own asset instead of someone else’s 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 strongly recommend avoiding black hat solutions, websites, methods, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is not to game web services or flaunt their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many small business owners lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts recommend doing. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of doing this …
(Posting content to different marketing channels individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving strategy 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 once, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media channels and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically to other blogs and online 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 site as described in Part Two. Then, configure your site settings as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate the process using plugins such as the ones shown in the following section.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content automatically to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, 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 great features.
After installing Jetpack, you will need to connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account you set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social sites.)
After configuring all of the plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in your publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they will be automatically distributed online.)
To learn more about using this powerful plugin, visit the plugin website: Jetpack by WordPress.com
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that lets your site users engage with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature using a number of 3rd-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your site more attractive to commenters by offering them a choice of backlinks if they tweet, like, or plus1 your content. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here to learn more about the benefits of using this plugin:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to drip-feed your content to many authority platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed your content automatically to dozens of online sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to over 30 social sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Google Plus, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Go here to learn more about this handy plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore over 30 social media monitoring tools and technologies that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing campaigns. Go here for more info:
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 Syndication Process – Summary
Once your WordPress site and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you then need to do is add new content on a consistent basis to automatically begin attracting more web traffic organically.
We have created an entire email email-based training course designed to help you never run out of great content for posting to your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next article in the series.
This is the end of Section Four
To read the rest of this article, click here:
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"I have used the tutorials to teach all of my clients and it has probably never been so easy for everyone to learn WordPress ... Now I don't need to buy all these very expensive video courses that often don't deliver what they promise." - Stefan Wendt, Internet Marketing Success Group
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