Welcome to Part Four of our Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part One of this series, we provide an overview of the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do is publish web content on a consistent basis to automatically drive more 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 web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a site, and what to do if your existing site is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed important configuration decisions.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this article, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help drive new traffic automatically to your website or blog simply by adding web content regularly.
Why It Makes Sense To Automate Your Traffic Generation
Depending on which marketing guru you talk to, you could find yourself trying to spend an hour a day (or more) posting content on social media while also trying to run your business, creating content and managing your online presence.
Most businesses simply lack the time, resources and financial means to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts recommend doing. If you were to spend all of your time checking Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how could you get anything else in your business done?
(Small businesses spend most of their time just keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small business owners spend most of their working hours just keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to stay competitive and grow in order to survive.
A study of small businesses done by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around 6 hours per week on social media (the other half of businesses surveyed using 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 research was done 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 was the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Businesses are spending more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic source: 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 equally 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.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other websites.
Automating systems and process to leverage time is nothing new. Businesses have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners, especially for those with limited marketing budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which marketing channels should you invest more of your time, efforts, and budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring the benefits of building content on your own website?
- 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 method for automating your web traffic generation 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 web marketing costs,
- Determine which marketing channels you should focus more of your efforts, time, and budget on,
- Invest most of your time and 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 recommend staying away from all black hat tools, websites, strategies, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Google, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article is not to manipulate web services or break their terms of service, but to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites used by your target audience.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many business owners lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of posting content to each different service, which can be extremely time-consuming …
(Posting content to marketing channels one at a time is extremely time-consuming!)
Why not choose this one 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 channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social channels and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and web 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 get all this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as described in Part Two. Then, get it configured as explained in Part Three. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate these processes 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 Automation Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at a few traffic-generation plugins that can help:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other online properties
Jetpack WordPress Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn 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 many great features.
After installing Jetpack, connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate a feature called Publicize …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
You can share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your content on various social media accounts.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details appear in your Publish box.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically be shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your content is automatically syndicated online.)
For more details about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your blog readers engage with your site, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-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 create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like SEO backlinks, social enticements for content-sharing, the ability to add twitter names to comments, and using keywords in the username. This plugin will visit the website or blog of the comment author while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can help attract more comments and traffic and create more user engagement on your web site.)
To learn more about this plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social Link Machine is a set-and-forget plugin for WordPress that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content to dozens of social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically drip-feed content to many authority websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Diigo, Instapaper, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Sett, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
For more details about the benefits of using this plugin, visit the plugin website: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (in order to get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a comprehensive article on social media measurement tools that will help you keep track of online trends, monitor competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that could affect your business, etc, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc here:
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 Automation Blueprint: Automated Content Sharing Phase – Summary
Once you have your website or blog and plugins set up and expertly configured, all you have to do is post content on a regular basis to begin bringing more web traffic.
We have created a complete email series aimed at helping you never run out of great content for posting to your web site:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic System series.
This is the end of Part Four
To read more, click on the link below:
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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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