Welcome to Part Four of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this article 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 or blog, all you have to do is post new content consistently to drive web traffic!)
In Part Two, we discuss critical setup decisions. We help you understand the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at configuring the system.
In this step, we configure hosting settings, WordPress settings, and external settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can get web traffic automatically to your website.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate The Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up investing 1-2 hours or more per day promoting your business on social media.
Most business owners simply lack the time, resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts advise. If you are spending half your day posting updates on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter in addition to researching and writing articles for your blog or website, how does anything in your business get done?
(Small businesses spend most of their working hours simply keeping their businesses up and running. Infographic: NFIB)
Small business owners spend most of their time keeping 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 conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (the other half 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 numbers would most likely be even higher.
- More than half of all small businesses surveyed spent 1-3 hours or more to create 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.com)
As small businesses spend more time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budgets, resources, and time and many areas to focus on have 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 sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. These companies often will make decisions that impact your business without prior warning. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and publish your content automatically to other websites.
Automating business systems and processes to leverage time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increasing availability of hundreds of new channels for marketing and promoting a business online creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which channels do you focus more time, efforts, and your budget 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 neglecting the benefits of building content on your own website?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to include in your marketing strategy?
The Benefits Of Automating The Traffic-Getting Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate the traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and budget 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, websites, tools, and anything that violates the terms of service and policies of companies like Facebook, Pinterest, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites 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 most businesses lack the time, 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 choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual marketing channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not do 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and social bookmarking sites,
- Distribute content (and comments) 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, get it configured as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with 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 quick look at some plugins that can:
- Post content automatically to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content to other online properties via RSS
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, 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 useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on various social media sites.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details show in the Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically shared online.)
For more details about using this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: Jetpack WordPress Plugin
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a native commenting feature that allows your blog readers to engage with your website, post new comments, reply to other users and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress built-in commenting feature with third-party plugins that integrate your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like the ability to add twitter usernames to comments, backlinks, using keywords in the username, and social enticements for content-sharing. This plugin will visit the comment author’s site while they type their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your web site.)
Go here for more information about the benefits of this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate and drip-feed content, build backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – drip-feed content to dozens of online websites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed your content to many social platforms, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Instapaper, Zotero, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
Visit this site to learn more about this great plugin: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content marketing efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools that will help you manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives. Go here to learn more about this:
The above are just a few examples of the many content distribution plugins that are available to WordPress users.
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 Syndication Process – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you have to do is post new content consistently to automatically begin attracting more web traffic.
If you need help coming up with endless ideas for posting content on your site, we recommend subscribing to our email training course on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read more, click on the link below:
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now
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