Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using WordPress.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we provided an overview of the traffic automation process, and explained why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do is post new content on a regular basis to attract web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss the setup phase. We explain the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set things up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site has been built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on important configuration decisions.
In this step, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we discuss ways to automate your traffic with different plugins.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing expert you get your advice from, you could end up investing an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Many small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing and content creation department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you spend half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time simply keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and make sales in order to survive.
Marketing research conducted by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours per 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 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 focus their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time 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 websites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. These sites often will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Investing in automation to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it since the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the increased availability of many new channels for promoting and marketing a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time. For example:
- Which marketing channels do you focus more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that belong to other people (e.g. YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring your own website?
- 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 share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this strategy, you will be able to:
- Save time creating web content and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary online marketing channels,
- Determine which channels you should focus more budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your efforts building your own asset 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 software, sites, techniques, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of sites like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic doesn’t require using black hat methods!)
The focus of this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites frequented by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, resources, and time.
So, instead of posting content to services one at a time, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one at a time is very time-consuming!)
Why not use this time-saving approach 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 the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 as shown in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate the content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation System – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other blogs via RSS
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 functions.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (which you would have set up in Part Three.) …
(Make sure that Jetpack is connected to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to several social media accounts.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, 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, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new content is published, it will be automatically shared online.)
Jetpack provides an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting feature allows your site users to engage with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions as part of a social community.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature using third-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can create more user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like the ability to add twitter names to comments, social enticements for content sharing, backlinks, and ability to use keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Premium version can attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this powerful plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social LinkMachine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant videos and images, and second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to many traffic-generating websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to many social websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Reddit, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogging Platforms: e.g. Livejournal, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution campaigns), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools and technologies that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business,etc. For more details, 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 Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and fully set up, all you need to do then is post fresh content on a regular basis to begin attracting new traffic.
We have created an entire email training series aimed at helping you never run out of great content for posting to your website or blog:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To keep reading about this topic, click here:
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie
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