Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to drive traffic automatically to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One, we 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 is add fresh content consistently to automatically start generating web traffic!)
In Part 2, we looked at the setup phase of the traffic automation blueprint. We explained the best way to get started 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 website was built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we focus on the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part 3 you will configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically)
In Part 4, we will show you how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help bring new visitors automatically to your website or blog.
Why Automating The Traffic Generation Makes Sense
Depending on which marketing experts you listen to, you could find yourself spending an hour or more a day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply 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 online marketing experts recommend doing. If you are spending half your day posting updates on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn in addition to writing articles for your website or blog, how does anything else in your business get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small business owners spend their time. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time simply keeping 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 grow in order to survive.
Research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (the rest spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This usage of social media was a 66% increase from the previous year, so if the same research was done today, the figures would probably be 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 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. Source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time promoting and marketing themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other important areas …
(Businesses with limited budget, resources, and time and many different areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
One other thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time social media sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These sites can and will make decisions that can significantly impact your business without requiring your input. Why invest so much time and effort building a business on someone else’s real estate? With WordPress, you can have complete control of your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business 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 Digital Age, however, the exponential growth channels for marketing and promoting a business creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited time, budget, and resources. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels do you invest more time, budget, and efforts 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 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 Generation With WordPress
What we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that allows you to automate your traffic generation with WordPress.
With this formula, 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 time, budget, and your efforts on,
- Invest most of your time 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 urge you to avoid using black hat techniques, solutions, sites, and anything designed to “game” or violate the policies and terms of service of companies like Pinterest, Google, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not need to involve using black hat methods!)
The purpose of this article is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to sites visited by your target audience.
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 budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise doing. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to different marketing channels one at a time can be extremely 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 your content distribution to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social services and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 get all of this done?
Simple … first, set up your site as explained in Part Two. Then, expertly configure things as explained in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then connect all of the dots with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generation plugins that can be used to:
- Syndicate content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content via RSS to other blogs
Jetpack
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 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 Three …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Activate the Publicize feature)
Configure this section to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media accounts.)
After all of the settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options displayed in the Publish area.)
Now, whenever you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as new posts are published, they are automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides a hands-free way to create more exposure online for your content on social networks.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress native commenting system lets your blog readers interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of an online community.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them around.
For example, with a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like using keywords in the username, social enticements for sharing your content, search-indexable backlinks, and adding twitter handles to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they type their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which can be included with their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about this great plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that allows you to syndicate content, build anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social Link Machine – syndicate content to many authority sites)
With Social Link Machine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to many online websites, such as:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Deviantart, Diigo, Plurk, Stumbleupon, etc.
- Blogs: e.g. Blog.com, Sett, Tribe, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, visit the plugin site: SocialLinkMachine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get actionable information about your content distribution efforts), we have written a detailed article on social media tracking tools that are worth checking out and knowing about. Go here to learn more:
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 Blueprint: Automated Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been configured and set up, all you then need to do is publish great content on a consistent basis to automatically generate traffic.
If you need great content ideas for your website or blog, we recommend subscribing to our FREE email training series here:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next section of the WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Section 4
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