Welcome to Part Four of our Website Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to grow your business online automatically using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, here is what we have covered in this series:
In Part 1, we describe the traffic automation process, and explain why using an expertly configured WordPress site is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website, all you have to do to begin attracting more traffic is publish new content on a regular basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed the setup phase. We explained the best way to start 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 existing website was built using WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we discussed configuring the system.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure all the settings that can affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, we discuss ways to automate your traffic with different plugins.
Why Automate The Traffic-Getting Process?
Depending on which marketing guru you get your advice from, you could end up spending an hour or two per day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Many businesses lack the time, resources and budget to employ the services of a full-time marketing department and engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are prescribing. If you are spending half your day posting updates on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn in addition to researching and writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their working hours trying to keep 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 at least six 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 conducted today, the numbers would probably be significantly higher.
- More than half of all 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. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online in order to compete and survive, this leaves even less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other areas …
(Businesses with limited marketing budget, resources, and time and many business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or StumbleUpon. These companies can make decisions that impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can control your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online properties.
Automating processes to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the availability of many new marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited time, marketing budgets, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more efforts, time, and your budget on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, 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 I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy for automating your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and other marketing channels (e.g. social media),
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing channels,
- Determine which marketing channels you should invest more of your efforts, time, and your budget 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 strongly urge you to avoid using black hat strategies, websites, solutions, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of services like YouTube, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat methods!)
The focus of this article is not to game web services or bypass their terms of service, but to show you how to be smart with your limited resources and automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and marketing 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
As we’ve just seen in the previous section, most businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online 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 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 once, and automate your content distribution to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content 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 site as explained in Part Two. Then, get it all configured as described in Part Three. After all this is in place, you then automate these processes using plugins.
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 a few traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking websites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Distribute content to other websites via RSS
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, GooglePlus, LinkedIn and more as soon as you publish new content using a WordPress 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 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google+, and more …
(Share your content automatically on several social sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account details displays in the publishing area.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free, automated way to get more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting feature that lets your blog readers interact with your site, post new comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can expand the WordPress native commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread your content online.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can make your blog more attractive to commenters by offering them a wider choice of backlinks if they plus1, like, or tweet your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they enter their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
For more details about using this powerful plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content to many traffic-generating platforms, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – drip-feed content automatically to over 30 traffic-generating sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to many social sites, such as:
- Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Scoop.it, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Sett, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Docdroid, Sendspace, etc.
To learn more about this handy plugin, visit this site: 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 campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media measurement tools and technologies that are worth knowing about here:
The above are just a few 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 System: Automated Content Sharing Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been fully set up and expertly configured, all you then have to do to automatically begin bringing more web traffic is add web content regularly.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with unlimited content ideas for posting to your website:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is explained in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
To read more, click on the link below:
***
"Your training is the best in the world! It is simple, yet detailed, direct, understandable, memorable, and complete." Andrea Adams, FinancialJourney.org
***