Welcome to Part Four of our WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to turn your website into an automated traffic generation machine using the WordPress CMS platform.
So far, we have covered the following in this article series:
In Part 1 of this series, we explain why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress blog, all you have to do is add great content on a consistent basis to bring more traffic!)
In Part 2, we discussed the setup phase of this blueprint. We explained the best way to start 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 has been built with WordPress.
(In Part two we show you how to set up a WordPress website or blog on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase of the blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your site’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three we show you how to configure hosting settings, internal settings, and external settings that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In this section, we discuss ways to automate traffic to your website with plugins.
Why Automate The Traffic Generation Process?
Depending on which business marketing guru you talk to, you could end up investing an hour or two every day (or more) promoting your business on social media.
Most businesses simply lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online marketing experts recommend. If you spent all of your time posting updates on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how would you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business running is how most small businesses spend their time. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their time trying to keep 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.
Research conducted by email and social media marketing company Vertical Response found that:
- Almost half of all small businesses surveyed spent at least 6 hours each week on social media (most of the other businesses surveyed that used social media spent even more time – between 6 and 21+ hours per week). This 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 to create a blog post.
- Finding and posting content for social media consumed the most time online.
(Businesses are spending more time each year marketing and promoting themselves online. Infographic: VerticalResponse.com)
As businesses spend more time on online marketing in order to compete and survive, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited resources, budget, and time and many different areas to focus on require careful planning of their marketing strategy.)
One other thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social media websites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. These companies can make decisions that can significantly affect your business without first consulting you. Why invest so much effort and time building a business on someone else’s real estate? With a self-hosted WordPress site, you can control your own virtual real estate and post your content automatically to other sites.
Automating business systems and processes to save time and increase productivity is nothing new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the dawn of the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the increased availability of so many new online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and business managers, especially for those with limited resources, time, and budgets. For example:
- Which of these marketing channels should you invest more budget, time, and efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that you do not own (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.) while ignoring 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 Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to share with you now, is a free, simple, and effective formula that lets you automate your traffic-getting process with WordPress.
With this formula, you will be able to:
- Save time creating content for your website or blog and social media,
- Save money on content creation and unnecessary web marketing costs,
- Determine which channels you should focus more of your time, efforts, and your budget 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 recommend avoiding black hat solutions, strategies, sites, and anything designed to flaunt or violate the terms of service and policies of companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation doesn’t require the use of black hat methods!)
What we are focusing here is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and increase your exposure online to websites 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, many businesses lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts recommend. What you want to do, then, is to be strategic and work smart within your limited time, resources, and budget.
So, instead of choosing this approach …
(Posting content to different services one by one can be very time-consuming!)
Why not opt for 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 the distribution of your content to all other marketing channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media sites 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as described in Part 2. Then, configure it as described in Part 3. After all this is in place, you then automate the content distribution using plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Blueprint – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a look now at some examples of traffic-generating WordPress plugins that can:
- Syndicate content to social sites and social bookmarking sites
- Post comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS feeds to other web properties
Jetpack by WordPress.com
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, LinkedIn, GooglePlus 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 functions.
After Jetpack has been installed, connect the plugin to the WordPress.com account set up in Part 3 …
(Connect Jetpack to your WordPress.com account)
Next, activate the Publicize feature …
(Jetpack plugin – Publicize feature)
Configure this section to share your posts on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Share your posts automatically on several social accounts.)
After all of the plugin and account settings have been configured, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize options show in your post publishing box.)
Now, whenever 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 post will be automatically distributed online.)
Jetpack provides you with an automated and hands-free way to get more exposure online for your content on social media websites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
WordPress has a built-in commenting function that lets your blog readers interact with your web site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and engage with your content as part of a community.
You can enhance the WordPress default commenting feature with a 3rd-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to spread and share your content around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Pro version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your website or blog. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like adding twitter names to comments, social enticements for content-sharing, ability to use keywords in the username, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which can be included at the bottom of their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv can attract more comments and web traffic and improve user engagement on your website or blog.)
To learn more about this WordPress plugin, go here:
SocialLinkMachine
(SocialLinkMachine – WordPress content distribution plugin)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget plugin that lets you syndicate and drip-feed content, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and 2nd-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(Social LinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed content automatically to many traffic-generating websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed your content to dozens of traffic-generating websites, including:
- Social Bookmarking Platforms: e.g. Bitly, Folkd, Kippt, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- Document Sharing Platforms: e.g. Issuu, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about this plugin: Social LinkMachine
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 comprehensive article where we explore several social media measurement tools and technologies that you may want to check out. More information:
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 System: Content Distribution Stage – Summary
Once your website and plugins have been expertly configured and set up, all you then need to do to automatically start generating web traffic is publish fresh content on a consistent basis.
We have created an entire email series designed to help you never run out of content ideas for posting to your website:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize as much of the process as can be improved. This step is addressed in the next article in our series.
This is the end of Section Four
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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