Ok, I've been an affiliate marketer for quite a while now, and I know about the various avenues for responsibly referring sales. Here's something I came across though that I don't understand. There's this person on Twitter that has 88 followers and he's constantly sending out tweets with affiliate links to a certain product. He's got over 16,000 tweets. Here's what I don't get. How can this even be worth his time? Obviously, he's just spamming all his followers, but he only has 88 of them, and he's posted a ridiculous amount of tweets. There's also people that have quite a few more followers, but they're not even promoting to any particular market, and they're just sending out random affiliate links to various products. One big question I have is, wouldn't these people who are following users like these simply unfollow them as soon as they saw all the spam? It seems like some of these people must have been at this for quite a while now though, but I don't know how it could be worth it. What I'm interested in though is getting some followers who are into the same types of products I'm into, and then posting the occasional link, which I admit I haven't done yet due to so many other obligations. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Pretty interesting.
I know theres people that are making money doing this on Twitter. I think people are having less and less success with it these days and Twitter will ban people pretty quick so I would NOT use your own account. I've tried making money with Twittter but never had any luck personally.
Get people to retweet a specific tweet. Out of the retweeters, randomly select a winner to receive a freebie, be it a service or product. All these retweets will get your company name out to potentially hundreds or thousands of new potential customers. Tetley Tea Folk (@tetley_teafolk) do this to great effect with their #freeteafriday, giving away a year’s supply of tea every week.
Probably the 88 that are on his list are not even real people if they are still following him. No real person would continue to follow someone who sends out massive amounts of affiliate tweets.
Thanks for the replies, everyone. I'm sorry, I didn't come back till now cause I didn't know there were any replies to this. After posting this, I started to put some things together about it, and I think I might understand what's going on. There's a lot of people who look like they've set up their accounts to automatically post these links. They're Amazon affiliates. My thought when I saw it was, "How can they be allowed to share their product page links on Twitter?" Well, it turns out that Amazon Associates has a "Share" feature on top of each page that can post a link to that specific product page. I don't really see it as spam per se, because the only way you even come across these people's tweets is if you run a search for a specific subject and it's associated with a product. For example, if someone did a search for a certain book on twitter to see if people were talking about it, then you might also come across a tweet from an Amazon affiliate which is a link to that product page. But needless to say, with the commission being so small, it's almost not worth doing. That is, unless there's a way to set things up to do it automatically. And I believe there must be a way, because I've got someone on my list right now that's constantly tweeting straight to amazon 24/7. No person could just sit there and do that without stopping, so somehow they've found a way. This can be done manually too, and you can use bit.ly to track your links, but it's a challenge to get many links out there. I've tried doing this out of curiousity, and have only had a very low percentage of clicks, and no sales, but it's interesting. I don't really know how Amazon would feel about people constantly posting Tweets to their products, but then again, they do endorse people sharing their links via Twitter. There's something called twitterfeed, which will automatically post your blog to your twitter account. I'm wondering if maybe those affiliates are using some type of Wordpress plugin that can quickly pull amazon products in, include a short description, and that person's affiliate ID. If so, it might be an interesting experiment to use that and see if you can make a few dollars.
It seems like there could be much more productive and lucrative things one could do. It doesn't sound like a good business plan to just post links on Twitter all day. But if it's working for them, I guess there's no foul in it.
I have 45,000+ followers in my Twitter account (@Newsletterguy), and what I will tell you is that from what I've experienced it is a great way to generate traffic to a third party resource such as a quality blog post you make or a video etc instead of an affiliate link. Otherwise, as you mentioned people will be spammed like crazy, and will be less inclined to click on your link next time you post one. You could almost think of it kind of like micro-email marketing since Tweets are such short messages, but the same rule applies - people seek quality (not spam). If you give them what they want your reputation will build, if you don't they will almost surely unfollow you and possibly spread the word to others about your lack of professionalism etc. Nothing wrong with the occasional promotion of something - but only if it's providing true value to your followers instead of spamming them. Best regards!