Advanced Twitter marketing research has shown a lot of different ways to use Twitter in your Internet and affiliate marketing, but unfortunately too many novice marketers are now starting to use Twitter as their main, or only, form of online promotion. As much as I love Twitter and it's potential profit paths for an online business, I STRONGLY recommend AGAINST using Twitter as your main marketing activity.
Why? First, Twitter doesn't belong to you - meaning the owners could at any time shut it down. In almost 13 years online now I've seen a number of big sites come and go, and while Twitter seems firmly rooted at the moment, remember that they still haven't monetized the service. Even with the business brilliance of Biz Stone & crew, and the small staff they've stayed to, they do have some good-sized expenditures for hardware, bandwidth, etc. Sooner or later the bills have to be paid, and I for one will feel much more comfortable about Twitter's future once they have a monetization system set up and working well.
Second, the service could be doing fine - but still shut down YOUR account. There have been a few days recently when 50 or 100 accounts are suddenly suspended for 'suspicious activity'. Seems the way they've kept the spammers out is by applying algorithms that knock out any suspicious behavior - but as with all such systems, some get clipped that haven't broken any rules. So far Twitter has been impressively fast in restoring accounts caught in the crossfire, but what happens when the number of users and user accounts doubles or quadruples?
Having your account down for 3 or 4 days may not seem like much of a problem, but if it's your main promotional vehicle and those 3 or 4 days coincide with your big launch, or the launch of an affiliate marketing opportunity, it could mean missing out on thousands of dollars in sales or commissions!
The third (and most important) reason is the same reason Twitter is so perfect as part of your marketing mix. Targeted traffic from Twitter is instant - you tweet, some of your followers see it and a percentage of them click through to your link. How many do depends on a myriad of factors - but mostly on how targeted your following is and how many see that tweet.
So why is that a disadvantage? Because within a minute or two, your tweet has scrolled offscreen for anyone except those that have you in their 'VIP list' in some interfaces. So to keep traffic coming in, you have to keep tweeting that same tweet a few times a day every day. As soon as you move on to another opportunity, traffic from Twitter to that first link dries up pretty quickly.
Compare that to article marketing, podcasts or video submissions, that potentially continue to drive traffic for you for days, weeks, months and even years in some cases. Blog posts are another great example of this, for while your current posts get the most action for you, some of your earlier posts may still generate a lot of traffic through being found in the search engines, blog directories, podcast directories, etc.
So just as when marketing in the offline world, keep your online marketing mix balanced using a combination of immediate traffic generation, mid-term strategies and long-term targeted traffic magnets. With a good balance you can have a good launch, then continue to see sales from that product, service or affiliate marketing promotion for some time to come as you turn your focus to your next money-making opportunity!
Doug Champigny is a well-known Internet marketing mentor, speaker, super-affiliate and the author of Advanced Twitter Marketing. Learn the 14 traffic generation strategies that should be in your marketing mix from the Top Traffic Tips audio and e-book.
