The affiliate marketer’s super simple guide to Twitter: Your daily plan

Twitter marketing receives a lot of attention these days, yet many affiliate marketers still struggle with how to make it work as an effective affiliate marketing tool. In fact, quite a few people I’ve spoken to recently aren’t sure if Twitter is even worth the effort.

Although Twitter doesn’t make affiliate marketers money in the literal way that a newsletter series or article marketing does, it’s still a very powerful weapon in your arsenal because it gives you a way to build relationships with people.

Last week I talked about why building relationships is so essential to email marketing, and addressed those that are skeptical about any ‘relationship building’ channel because the results aren’t immediately obvious to them. This concept also applies to social media marketing and you should read the full post here if you haven’t already.

 In a nutshell: People buy things from people they trust, so putting effort into establishing your credibility through online relationship building can win you loyal customers for life.

Now that we’re on the same page about why it is beneficial to build relationships using Twitter, let’s take a look at how to go about doing it.

Just to be clear, the goal of your Twitter profile is NOT:

a) To get the most followers you can. Twitter shouldn’t be used as a popularity contest. Not every follower is of equal value to you; you want to focus on the ones that are of most value.

b) To post a continuous stream of content or affiliate links at your followers until they block you.

The goal of your twitter profile is to build meaningful relationships that will in turn help you sell, and to do that you have to talk to your followers as friends.

Okay, so where do you start?

1. First up, you need a Twitter account. Go to Twitter and set one up (it’s easy!).

2. Secondly, I advise you put a call to action on your website for people to follow you on Twitter, and setup a retweet button on your blog. This is a good starting point for building your network of relevant ‘followers’ of your twitter account.

3. Thirdly, seek out and follow the Twitter profiles of key people and organizations in your niche, and any other people regularly posting great content that’s relevant.

Now, you’re ready to start tweeting. You'll receive your free daily Twitter plan via direct message (DM) that you can use as a guide to getting started simply by sharing the link below on your Twitter feed and following @Affilorama on Twitter:

Click here to share and get your FREE Daily Twitter Plan

(Note: As I have just demonstrated, a good way to increase your followers is by offering an incentive for them to follow you :))

Must-Have Tools to Streamline Your Tweets

You might be thinking that this Twitter business sounds like a time consuming, logistical nightmare - but it doesn’t need to be. There are scores of Twitter applications and services out there that can help you streamline your Twitter experience. A really useful one is SocialOomph. SocialOomph allows you to schedule your tweets to be posted ahead of time, and setup an automated DM for new followers - truly a ‘set and forget’ service.

The one thing you can’t do with SocialOomph is schedule @replies to people. And rightly so in my opinion. If you automate everything then you drastically reduce the opportunity to build effective relationships with people.

Another handy application is Echofon. You can install this on your Firefox status bar, making it easy for you to quickly read your own Twitter feed, see if you have any mentions (when people include @yourname in their tweets), post updates and @replies/mentions to people.

Now, there is also quite a bit of Twitter lingo and fancy pants tricks you can do but I don’t want to overwhelm you with all of this when you’re just starting out. Twitter has a user-friendly help center where you can find answers to anything unusual you’re wondering about. Their glossary and Twitter basics are particularly useful.

Thinking this blog post seems a bit light on the juicy details? You’ll find them in our daily twitter plan for affiliate marketers that you’ll receive via DM when you follow Affilorama on twitter and share the link below. This will tell you exactly what you should be posting on Twitter to be most effective at relationship building and why. Go on, go and get it now.