Affiliates on Twitter: The Next Battle Ground

There are many affiliate marketers who take advantage of the latest technologies to make more money online. There is such a thing as early mover, and the sooner you position yourself to take advantage of the latest developments all around you, the better you can position yourself to start dominating your market. Twitter has quickly become one of those battlegrounds for affiliates. Twitter is one of the best services to drive traffic to any website. It’s not just about the quantity of traffic but rather the quality of it as well. Let’s say you have a website about credit cards, and you have 10,000 people following you on Twitter. If you have truly put the time in to gain your followers trust, there is no reason you can’t make money from your efforts.

Just like any other technology, there is a right way and wrong way to use it. There are many affiliates who are using black hat tactics to create bogus accounts on Twitter and use them to bombard the community with their affiliate offers. You can almost tell an automated account for a real one these days. But the scripts and bots are becoming more sophisticated. That practice is going to get a bit more difficult to execute with the latest FTC ruling. And let’s not forget about the community backlash against spammers. If you are dubbed as a spammer, it’s going to get you ignored or banned on twitter. You’ll lose all your followers in the process.

Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with using automated tools such as Humming Bird or TweetAdder. You can have all the followers in the world, but I personally don’t see any problem with that practice as long as you are not spamming your followers. Having lots of followers is a big responsibility. If you can’t gain their trust and provide them with valuable content, you are going to lose them eventually. So while having them can be a big boost for your business, it will keep you honest as well (unless you don’t mind getting banned on Twitter).

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How To Use Twitter To Promote Affiliate Products

You don’t have to be a genius to realize the amazing opportunity that Twitter provides for businesses and online marketers to promote their offers and gain more exposure. Twitter is a fast growing community, and it’s only going to get bigger. While a lot of people used to underestimate the power of Twitter just a few months ago, you don’t see them doing it now. But a lot of people still use Twitter the wrong way for their business. Not only you can use Twitter to build new relationships, you can use it to come up with new product ideas and even drive leads directly to your affiliate offers. So if you are using Twitter to talk about what you are having for lunch, you are better off not using Twitter at all.

Promoting products on Twitter is not that hard. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to get working on Twitter. You just have to get to the right audience and strike the right balance when it comes to providing value to others and promoting your affiliate offers. Here is how to do it:

• Identify Audience: find out who would be interested in products that you intend to promote. You wouldn’t promote gadgets to people who are looking for weight loss solutions, would you? They may buy those gadgets but your conversion rate would be atrocious.
• Track trends: find out what people are talking about and what affiliate products you can promote to address their needs.
• Right keywords: don’t just focus on the most obvious keywords. Do a bit of research to find those long-tail keywords as well.
• Follow The Right People: you should not only follow the superstars in your niche, but also people who are talking about your niche (product, market,…). And if you provide enough value, these folks may follow you back as well.
• Use hash tags (#): don’t forget to use the right hash tags to let others find out about your discussions. People who use hash tags have a better chance of getting more followers on Twitter. Just make sure you hashes are relevant.
• Your profile: make sure you profile explains what you do and what you are about. I know a lot of affiliates actually promote affiliate URLs as their profile URL. I am not a big fan of this approach, but it does work.
• Your welcome message: when people decide to follow you, you can send them a message welcoming them. You can easily automate it with TweetLater.
• Twitter Search: twitter search lets you find what people are talking about in your niche fast. Search for the right terms, and you’d be surprised how many prospects you can find for your offers.
• Promotion: you can tweet affiliate offers on Twitter but make sure it’s not too blatant. Let people know why they should try your product.

There you have it. There are many other ways to make money on Twitter. It just comes down to your creativity. The sky’s the limit with Twitter as long as you don’t get too greedy.

My Experience with Facebook Ads & Affiliate Marketing

A few months ago, I jumped on the Facebook Ads bandwagon. I was using Facebook on a regular basis, and I found the targeting features on Facebook Ads platform very attractive. But best of all, the clicks were coming cheap, and  I was getting a whole lot of traffic from Facebook. Sometimes, I even got lucky and my campaigns went viral, but for that you need creativity and some hard work After testing the platform for a few months, I am ready to wash my hands off of it. This isn’t to say that you can’t make money with Facebook Ads. But you may want to know the facts before putting money up with Facebook:

• Clicks: you’ll get clicks. You’ll get a lot of them as long as you pay the minimum or close to the minimum bid suggested by Facebook ads. But those folks are simply not ready to take action. They don’t even know where their credit cards are. Don’t expect to become the next millionaire in the affiliate marketing world with Facebook Ads.
• Targeting: the targeting capabilities of Facebook Ads are interesting but still leave something to be desired. I tried marketing credit cards to entrepreneurs and got a lot of clicks on that, but I wish I could get more specific with my targeting. Result? I made no money from that campaign.
• Quality of Clicks: going back to the first point, the conversion rates are often atrocious if you take the same approach you would on Google Adwords. Facebook crowd is a special bunch, and they don’t fall for the same tricks searchers do.
• Rules: I am all for having guidelines and rules when it comes to advertising online. But Facebook is too strict for me. I couldn’t even get my weight loss campaign to pass their filter. Sometimes you get lucky but in most cases they disapprove your ad as soon as you go near something profitable.
• More Rules: Even after setting my expectations low with Facebook, I still find them to be too strict when it comes to marketing. Acceptable but not for affiliate marketing.
• Platform: the Facebook Ads platform is very easy to use, but there is a lot that can be improved. One would expect Facebook to build more tools to help folks use their platform in a more effective way. Maybe in 2009.

Facebook Ads is a wonderful platform and can get your site exposure, but it’s not right for every campaign. In fact, only a small number of offers can really make money on the platform. Of course, I won’t tell you which ones are making me money, so don’t even ask

Are You Taking Advantage Of Social Media?

Social media and Web 2.0 caught fire a couple of years ago, and folks have been jumping on the bandwagon since then. Using Twitter a year go would have made you an early adopter, but nowadays using Twitter is more of a necessity than anything else. Twitter used to be just a micro-blogging platform that folks hated just a year ago, but you can’t imagine how much traffic Internet marketing geniuses are driving to their sites by staying active on Twitter.

If you have not been using Twitter so far, the least you can do is create a Twitter profile for yourself or your business. If you have no idea how to create a good Twitter profile, you can just learn from the top Twitter users. But if you look at guys like Ed Dale in the top 20, you’ll see that they don’t try to spam Twitter by continuously posting affiliate offers. They link to useful sites, and they engage with their followers.

Affiliate marketing on Twitter really can’t be done in a direct kind of way. Folks are too smart to fall for someone who’s just trying to make a quick buck. You can easily get ignored by the Twitter community if you are too pushy. But if you show the community that you are there to provide value and not just spam the community, you can generate lots of traffic and even make a greater number of sales.

Your take: are you using Twitter to promote affiliate offers? Have you had success linking directly to affiliate offers?