Most affiliate marketers would have heard of the new product called “Twitter Traffic Machine” by now. Clickbank’s stats have it down as having the highest gravity of all their products at the moment, so I decided to buy the product and discovered that the concept behind it was a very intriguing one. In a nutshell “Twitter Traffic Machine” shows people how to utilize Twitter to secure affiliate sales.

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a totally free micro-blogging and social networking service that lets users keep up to date with each other’s updates, or tweets as they are known in the community. These tweets are basically short posts of up to 140 characters in length which are shown on the users profile page and at the same time are sent out to other members of the community who have subscribed to receive the individuals tweets – or followers of the person. To cut a long story short, the more followers you may have for your Twitter account, the more potential visitors a site of yours could receive if you send out a tweet that contained your URL or affiliate link embedded. The nagging question for me though, was the following: is this method really as effective as others are making it out to be? I came to a decision to give it a try and the following is a case study of the results I achieved.

The first thing I did was create three Twitter accounts and started to try and gain followers. Initially, people were reluctant to become followers of myself, but I soon found out that the more followers you gain, the more will start joining you. You see, having followers is rather like having “authority” – the more you have, the more others will respect you and be inclined to join your followers list. Getting to a thousand followers was the hard part, but once I got to that milestone, within a month I had 7000 to my main account. The other two accounts (don’t forget I opened three initially) had about two thousand followers each so altogether I had almost 11,000 followers.

But were my efforts of attracting all these followers worth the trouble? Did I manage to make any affiliate sales? The answer is no. Through various tweets I sent to the followers had affiliate links and landing page links, they didn’t convert at all. Out of 11,000 followers, only an amazing 0.003% clicked on a link – yes, only 33 people out of 11,000 clicked a link! You may be saying that there had to have been a reason for this; maybe the traffic wasn’t targeted enough? In fact, all my followers were people that were somehow interested in affiliate marketing and as so had “affiliate marketing” as one of their interests. Well, the reasons for not making any affiliate sales, in my opinion, is spam. Have a look at what I mean:

You can see that so many individuals are trying to sell one product or another that if you post a tweet with any affiliate links embedded, it disappears in a flood of other ads.

The verdict? Well, I think it’s clear. From my point of view, twitter is worthless when it comes to affiliate marketing. When Twitter first started and there weren’t many affiliate marketers there, it may have been possible to make some money from it, but now it is not so simple. You have to note though, that I’m talking about the Twitter platform, not the Twitter Traffic Machine, which I discovered to be quite good. It did deliver what it promised on the sales page and I got lots and lots of subscribers in a relatively short span of time by utilizing the methods described.

If you have been able to make an affiliate sale using Twitter, please post a comment below to let us know the details. How many people followed you? How many clicks did you get per tweet? What niche were you promoting? Etc, etc.