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.
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#1 by Lucas - June 30th, 2009 at 12:36
Not used it myself. But know how the twitter traffic machine works. I always thought it would be good for geting followers targeted to SEO and directing them to a free ebook, I dunno, something like “How to get the top 10 competitors in your niche to link to you without begging or hacking”. Describe a system that works if they coded it themselves and sell a premade subsciption service so if they can’t or won’t code they’ll just use your turn key service.
#2 by Internet marketing - June 30th, 2009 at 12:54
I was using Twitter until I got banned because of using Humingbird which I believed at that time was their software.
Anyways, I got about 40 visitors a day, but very crappy quality. It is obvious Twitter is a kinda spammy social network where there hang out two categories of people:
- people with no interest whatsoever in buying any kind of products; (they talk for fun)
- marketers that spam everything and anything that touches their profiles, followers, feeds etc
#3 by Make Money Online - June 30th, 2009 at 17:20
I have a question for you – how many times per day did you send “tweets” with your affiliate links to click? Were you also sending other types of content to interest people (so they don’t think you’re just spamming them)? I’m still testing the waters myself, and the jury is out for me yet. I will let you know if I have any luck…
#4 by Sergey Lorens - June 30th, 2009 at 22:15
Once ore twice per day. I have also sent them lots of information on affiliate marketing. let us know if you get any sales using Twitter. Good luck.
#5 by Traffiliate - July 3rd, 2009 at 06:10
Hi! Can anybody explane what exactly that twitter traffic machine does? Is it just to help getting you a followers on autopilot? does it guarantee that you make money?
I have an idea (my knowhow) how to generate on full autopilot 500+ followers a day up to max 1000. Im I gonna get a lot of people who will use my service for a small $1-$2 a month?
#6 by shannon - July 6th, 2009 at 04:54
I used to twitter until i got banned.i had 20 accounts.All but 2 of them were banned.I beleive they were banned because i was using tweetlater to advertise my affliate products over all accounts.I did make money though before i was banned.Out of 20 accounts i probably had 18,000 followers which i built up in three weeks.I made over $100 dollars in a week on Twitter which wasnt bad considering the only investment i made was my time.I did have other content going to all accounts from google and twitterfeed.Oh well im not giving up on affiliate marketing though.It’s too much fun but a lot of work.
#7 by shannon - July 6th, 2009 at 17:03
Update twitter got a spamcloud on sunday and suspended a lot of accounts.They lifted the suspensions late sunday night.If you are doing marketing on twitter.You need to send your affiliate link out there a lot of times a day.If you are only sending out your link only a couple of times a day,you are missing a lot of traffic most people don’t stay on twitter all day long.You need to send that link out there at least once every couple hours.You also need interesting content going to your twitter account.I did but the twitter traffic machine and it showed me things i didn’t know and saved me a lot of time.I use it to promote othere electronic products on twitter.
#8 by Sergey Lorens - July 6th, 2009 at 17:54
One of my twitter accounts was temporary suspended on sunday, however, everything is ok right now. I agree with you, the more tweets you create, the more traffic you get, however, the conversion rate is too low, I got 300 hops and no sales. Therefore, I concluded that twitter is almost worthless in terms of affiliate marketing. BTW, what is your avarage conversion rate, Shannon?
#9 by shannon - July 6th, 2009 at 20:33
well it is extremley low but theses are also hard sales.they are buying the product without knowing you and therefore they are going out on a limb.I have only started promoting clickbank products less than 2 weeks ago.i have 25 twitter accounts.The traffic is just to great not to try.I have a website but it doesnt do much traffic and im not ready to build anothere one now.
#10 by amanda stryker - July 8th, 2009 at 10:16
What you have written is very insightful and much better than what several others have written on this topic. Thanks for a job well done. I am making a list of top websites and I am going to include your site.
#11 by shannon - July 8th, 2009 at 19:43
sergey,thank you for the information on affiliate marketing i have just started a few weeks ago on Clickbank.Yes it is very hard to amke money online.I started my website a year ago and put google ads on it.The most money i have made so far has been with clickbank.i want to make a new website and put good affiliaye products on it similiar to what you have done.if you have any advice on what kind of website to make or how you did it,it would be greatly appreciated.i want to sell a broad range of affiliate products i don’t want to limit myself.i thoughtabout making a review website and giving real honest reviews not just giving a review then telling the customer to go out a buy this ebook.what do you think?
#12 by Sergey Lorens - July 8th, 2009 at 20:55
If you want to give your visitors a real honest review, you should buy the product you promote first. Usually, internet marketers just rewrite other people’s reviews or write reviews based on the product’s sales page
Creating a review website is a good idea but it will be more difficult to promote it. Usually, when new products hit the market, I create mini websites and review these products. It is very easy to achieve high positions in search engines because in most cases, keywords such as PRODUCT NAME + REVIEW are low competitive at the beginning.