Welcome to Part 4 of our WordPress Web Site Traffic Blueprint article series, where we explain how to create an automated traffic machine using the WordPress CMS.
So far, we have covered the following in this series:
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do is add content regularly to automatically drive traffic!)
In Part 2, we focus on the setup phase of the blueprint. We help you understand the best way to start if you don’t have a website yet, how to set things up if you already have a site, and what to do if your website is built with WordPress.
(In Part 2 we show you how to set up WordPress on your domain)
In Part Three, we focus on the configuration phase of this blueprint.
Here, we configure all the settings (hosting, internal and external) that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability …
(In Part Three you will configure all the settings that affect your site’s traffic-getting ability)
In this step, we discuss ways to automate the traffic-generation process using a number of plugins.
Why You Should Consider Automating Your Traffic-Getting Process
Depending on who you listen to, you could find yourself spending a couple of hours or more per day promoting your business on social media, as well as trying to manage your business, your content and your online presence.
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 advise. If you are spending hours checking Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in addition to researching and writing content for your blog or website, how will you get anything in your business done?
(Keeping a business up and running is how most small businesses spend their time. Infographic: National Federation Of Independent Businesses)
Small businesses spend most of their working hours keeping their businesses up and running. In addition to running a business, there’s sales and marketing. After all, businesses need to remain competitive and grow in order to survive.
Research conducted 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 using 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 conducted today, the figures would most likely be even 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 the activity that consumed the most time online for all businesses surveyed.
(Small businesses spend more time every year marketing and promoting themselves online. Source: VerticalResponse)
As small businesses spend increasingly larger amounts of time marketing and promoting themselves online in order to compete and survive, this puts more and more of a squeeze on businesses to prioritize their time on other equally important areas …
(Businesses with limited budgets, time, and resources and many different areas to focus on have to plan their marketing strategy very carefully.)
Another important thing to consider is that, in addition to spending time promoting and marketing your business on various social media sites, you are investing all of your efforts into virtual real estate that you have no control over. You don’t own Twitter, Facebook, or StumbleUpon. These companies often will make decisions that can dramatically impact your business without prior notification. Why invest so much effort and time building content on someone else’s asset? With WordPress, you can control your own real estate and distribute your content automatically to other sites.
Automating systems and process to save time is not new. Businesses of all sizes have been doing it ever since the Industrial Age. In the Digital Age, however, the exponential growth online marketing channels creates a number of dilemmas for small business owners and marketing managers, especially for those with limited budget, time, and resources. For example:
- Which of these channels do you invest more of your budget, time, and your efforts on?
- Should you invest so much time and effort building a web presence on other people’s sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.) while neglecting the benefits of building content on your own domain?
- Do you create new content for every channel you plan to promote and market your business on?
The Benefits Of Automating Your Web Traffic Generation Process With WordPress
What I’d like to show you now, is a free, simple, and effective strategy that allows you to automate your traffic generation process with WordPress.
With this strategy, 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 marketing channels you should invest more of your time, budget, and your efforts 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, methods, solutions, and anything designed to manipulate or violate the terms of service and policies of sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc..
(Automating your web traffic does not require the use of black hat techniques!)
What we are focusing in this article series is to show you how to automate your content distribution so you can leverage your time and efforts, and get additional exposure online from websites that your target audience frequents.
An Automated Content Distribution, Traffic And Lead Generation, And Sales & Marketing System
We’ve just seen that many small business owners lack the time, human resources and financial means to engage in the kind of content marketing that most experts are prescribing. 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 individually can be very time-consuming!)
Why not choose a smarter, time-saving approach 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 content one-time, and automate the distribution of your content to all other channels.
You can:
- Automatically distribute content to social media services and bookmarking sites,
- Distribute comments and content automatically 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 site as explained in Part Two. Then, configure it as explained in Part Three. After all this is in place, you can then automate your content distribution using plugins such as the ones discussed in the section below.
The video below shows you how everything works once your WordPress site has been expertly configured …
WordPress Web Traffic Automation System – Traffic Generation Plugins
Let’s take a brief look at a few plugins that can help:
- Distribute content automatically to social media sites and social bookmarking websites
- Distribute comments automatically to other blogs
- Post content via RSS to other sites
Jetpack Plugin
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 plugin like JetPack.
Download URL: https://jetpack.com/
Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin with many useful functions.
After installing Jetpack, 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 …
(Jetpack – Publicize)
Once this section is configured, you will be able to automatically share your posts on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, GooglePlus, LinkedIn, and more …
(Distribute your posts to several social media sites.)
After configuring all plugin and account settings, your content is ready for distribution.
Publicize adds a new section to your Publish box …
(Publicize details displays in the publishing box.)
Now, as soon as you publish new content, it will automatically get shared online to every account you have set up …
(As soon as you publish, your posts are automatically syndicated online.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about using this plugin: Jetpack
CommentLuv
(CommentLuv)
The native WordPress commenting system lets your visitors interact with your website, post new comments, reply to existing comments and participate in discussions.
You can expand the WordPress default commenting feature with a third-party plugin that integrates your comments with social media, helping to share and spread them around.
For example, using a WordPress plugin like CommentLuv (Premium version) can help attract more comments and create more user engagement on your site. The plugin encourages readers to comment using SEO and social reward features like social enticements for content-sharing, using keywords in the username, search-indexable backlinks, and adding twitter names to comments. This plugin will visit the comment author’s website or blog while they are entering their comment and retrieve their last blog posts, which they can choose to include with their comment when they click the submit button.
(CommentLuv Pro version can encourage a greater level of commenting and create more user engagement on your website.)
Visit the plugin website to learn more about this handy plugin:
Social LinkMachine
(Social Link Machine – Content distribution plugin for WordPress)
Social LinkMachine is a set-and-forget WordPress plugin that lets you drip-feed content to over 30 online platforms, build backlinks, include relevant images and videos, and create second-tier links and social signals on auto-pilot …
(SocialLinkMachine – syndicate and drip-feed your content to over 30 traffic-generating sites)
With SocialLinkMachine installed, you can automatically syndicate and drip-feed content to over 30 traffic-generating platforms, such as:
- Bookmarking Sites: e.g. Delicious, Folkd, Plurk, Zotero, etc.
- Blogging Platforms: e.g. Blogger, Overblog, Tumblr, etc.
- Social Media Platforms: Google Plus, Xing, etc.
- Image Sharing: e.g. Flickr, etc.
- Document Sharing: e.g. Docdroid, Scribd, etc.
Go here to learn more about the benefits of this plugin: Social Link Machine
Also, if you would like to know more about setting up social media tracking (so you can get useful information about your content marketing campaigns), we have written a detailed article about social media tracking tools that are worth knowing about. To learn more about this go here:
The above are just some 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 Automation Blueprint: Content Syndication Stage – Summary
Once your site and plugins have been expertly configured and fully set up, all you have to do is post great content on a regular basis to automatically start generating web traffic organically.
If you need great ideas for content that you can post on your web site, then subscribe to our email training series on growing your business online with content marketing here:
Once you have expertly configured your WordPress site, the next step is to optimize the web-traffic generation process. This step is explained in the next section of our series.
This is the end of Part 4
To read the rest of this article, click on the link below:
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