Welcome to Part 4 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to automate traffic to your website using the WordPress CMS.
So far, here is what we have covered in this article series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website or blog is the key to automating traffic to your website …
(With an expertly configured WordPress site, all you have to do to automatically begin attracting web traffic is publish great content regularly!)
In Part 2, we focused on 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 has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part 3, we look at the configuration phase.
In this step, we configure all the settings that affect your website’s ability to generate traffic automatically …
(In Part Three you learn how to configure all the settings (hosting, WordPress and external) that can affect your website’s traffic-getting ability)
In Part Four, you will learn how to set up various WordPress plugins that can help bring traffic automatically to your website or blog.
Why You Should Consider Automating The Traffic Generation Process
Depending on which experts you talk to, you could find yourself investing an hour or two (or more) per day posting content on social media, as well as running your business, creating content and managing your web presence.
Most business owners 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 online marketing experts advise doing. If you are spending hours posting updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in addition to planning and writing content for your website or blog, how will you get anything else in your business done?
(Small business owners spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. Source: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Many 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 grow in order to survive.
Research done in 2012 by VerticalResponse – an email and social media marketing company, found that:
- 43% of all small businesses surveyed spent around six hours per 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 research was conducted today, the figures 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 was their most time-consuming online activity.
(Small businesses are spending more time marketing and promoting themselves online. Image source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend more time marketing and promoting themselves online as a matter of business survival and competition, this leaves less time for under-resourced businesses to focus on other equally vital areas …
(Businesses with limited time, resources, and budget and many different business areas to focus on need to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another thing to keep in mind is that, in addition to spending time social sites, all of your efforts are going into virtual real estate that you don’t control. You don’t own Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. These companies can and will make decisions that can significantly affect your business without prior warning. Why invest so much time and effort building content on someone else’s asset? With a self-hosted WordPress website, you can control your own real estate and publish 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 Industrial Age. In the Information Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited resources, marketing budget, and time. For example:
- Which of these channels do you focus more efforts, budget, and time on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building assets on sites that do not belong to you (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to market and promote your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What we’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective method 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 marketing channels you should focus more time, efforts, and your budget on,
- Invest most of your time and efforts 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 urge you to avoid using black hat sites, solutions, methods, and anything that violates the policies and terms of service of companies like Google, Pinterest, Facebook, etc..
(Web traffic automation does not have to involve using black hat methods!)
What we are focusing in this article is to show you how to automate your content distribution in order to leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites 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 small businesses lack the time, resources and budget to engage in the kind of content marketing that many online experts prescribe. What you want to do, then, is work smart within your limited time, budget, and resources.
So, instead of choosing this approach, which is very time-consuming …
(Posting content to individual channels can be extremely time-consuming!)
Why not opt for a smarter, time-saving strategy like the one shown below 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 the distribution of your content to all other services.
You can:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking sites,
- Automatically distribute content (and comments) 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 do all of this?
Simple … first, set up your website or blog as explained in Part 2. Then, get everything configured as shown in Part 3. Once all of this is in place, you then automate your content distribution with plugins.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint – Traffic Plugins
Let’s take a quick look at a few plugins that can:
- Post content to social media sites and social bookmarking accounts
- Syndicate comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content automatically via RSS to other web properties
Jetpack Plugin
You can get your posts automatically distributed to sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, 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 many great features.
After Jetpack has been installed, you will need to connect the plugin to your WordPress.com account (set up in Part Three.) …
(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 Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, GooglePlus, and more …
(Share your posts on several social media accounts.)
After configuring all of the account and plugin settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize account options in your post publishing section.)
Now, whenever you publish a new post, it will automatically get shared on all of the accounts you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your post will be automatically syndicated online.)
Jetpack provides you with a hands-free way to get more exposure for your content online on social media sites.
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The WordPress built-in commenting feature allows your blog readers to interact with your site, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can enhance the WordPress native commenting feature with third-party commenting plugins like Disqus, IntenseDebate, LiveFyre, or CommentLuv that integrate with social media, helping to share and spread them online.
For example, with a plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version), you can improve user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for sharing content, the ability to add twitter names to comments, ability to use keywords in the username, and SEO backlinks. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they type their comment and retrieve their latest blog posts, which they can choose to include below their comment after clicking the submit button.
(CommentLuv Premium version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Go here to learn more about using this plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a plugin that allows you to syndicate your content to many authority sites, build diverse anchor text backlinks, include relevant YouTube videos and images, and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate your content to many online websites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate content to dozens of social platforms, like:
- Social Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Bitly, Linkagogo, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Web 2.0 Blogs: e.g. Livejournal, Rebel Mouse, WordPress.com, etc.
- Social Platforms: Facebook, YouTube, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Pinterest, etc.
- PDF Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
To learn more about the benefits of using this plugin, visit the plugin 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 where we explore a number of social media tracking tools and technologies that are worth knowing about. Visit this page for more information:
The above are just some examples of the many plugins that WordPress makes available for automating and sharing 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 Blueprint: Content Syndication Process – Summary
Once your website or blog and plugins have been fully set up and configured, all you need to do to begin driving traffic is publish great content regularly.
If you need help coming up with great topics for posting content on your web site, then subscribe to our FREE email training course on growing your business with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the process. This step is covered in the next article in the WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, 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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