Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive traffic automatically to your site using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting more web traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a web presence yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your site was built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase.
Here, we configure all the settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part 4, you will learn how to set up various plugins that can drive traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Automate The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which marketing gurus you listen to, you could end up trying to spend an hour or two (or more) every day promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many marketing experts are advising. If you were to spend hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter in addition to writing content for your website or blog, how would anything in your business ever get done?
(Keeping their business up and running is how most small businesses spend their working hours. Infographic source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many business owners spend most of their time keeping their businesses up and running. On top of this, 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 done in 2012 by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- 43% of all businesses surveyed spent around six hours per week on social media (the other half 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 survey was done today, the numbers would most likely be significantly 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 their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses spend more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to focus their time on other areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budgets and many 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 media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest. These sites often will make decisions that impact your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much time and effort building content on rented real estate? With WordPress (self-hosted), you can have complete control of your own real estate and post your content automatically to other online accounts.
Automating processes to save time and increase productivity is not new. Businesses have been doing it ever since 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 business managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budgets, and time. For example:
- Which 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, Pinterest, etc.) while ignoring 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 we’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective method that lets you automate your traffic-getting 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 budget, efforts, and your time on,
- Invest most of your time 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 sites, techniques, software, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the policies and terms of service of sites like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this series of articles is to show you how to be smart with your resources and automate your content distribution so you can 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
We’ve just seen in the previous section that many small businesses lack the time, human resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts advise. What you want to do, then, is be strategic with your limited budget, time, and resources.
So, instead of posting content to each different marketing channel, which can be very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels 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 marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social sites and bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute comments and content to other blogs and online 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 WordPress website as described in Part 2. Then, get it configured as described in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you can then automate the process using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can help to:
- Post content to social sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Syndicate content automatically via RSS to other sites
Jetpack
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ 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 loads of useful features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to 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 on Jetpack)
Configure this section to share your posts on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Distribute your posts automatically to various social accounts.)
After all account and plugin settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
The Publicize feature adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options in the post publishing section.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically be shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as content is published, it is automatically distributed online.)
This is an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system allows your blog readers to engage with your website, post comments, reply to other users and engage with your content.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature using a third-party plugin like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrates with social media, helping to spread and share them online.
For example, using a plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and improve user engagement on your web site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social rewards like ability to use keywords in the user name, adding twitter handles to comments, search-indexable backlinks, and social enticements for sharing your content. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they are typing their comment and retrieve their most recent blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking submit.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and improve user engagement on your site.)
To learn more about the benefits of this WordPress plugin, go here:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Set-and-forget content distribution plugin)
SocialLinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that allows you to drip-feed content to over 30 online websites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to many social sites)
With Social LinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 authority websites, like:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Linkagogo, Kippt, Reddit, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blog.com, Rebel Mouse, Tribe, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing Platforms: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here for more details about the benefits of this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media monitoring (in order to get actionable information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article where we explore several social media monitoring tools that will help you identify new trends and opportunities, track competitor activity, see what conversations are taking place online that can affect your business,etc. To learn more, visit this page:
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 System: Automated Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once you have your site and plugins fully set up and configured, all you need to do then to automatically begin bringing web traffic is add new content on a regular basis.
We have created a complete email series designed to help you come up with endless content ideas for your website or blog:
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Automation System series.
This is the end of Section 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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