How Not To Use Twitter for Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a well-established means of earning an income, and many affiliates have capitalised on the growth of social media as part of their marketing strategy. Twitter, in particular, can provide a host of opportunities to affiliate marketers if used correctly, which, in turn, can help drive traffic to an affiliate's site and generate income. Inappropriate use of Twitter can, however, badly affect an affiliate's reputation, so here are the key mistakes you should avoid making when using Twitter.

Direct sales pitch

If you're going to get your message across in a Tweet, then you've got a 140-character limit in order to do it. Many affiliates use this limit to directly sell their products. Any successful marketer will know that you can't make a decent sale from such a restricted limit, and most followers would simply regard your message as spam and not take any notice of it. Therefore, one of the biggest sins you can make is using Twitter as a direct sales resource. Instead, use it to create interest and share news or useful information so that followers will be directed to your site on their own accord.

Don't become a spammer

Hands up who likes spam? It's fairly safe to say that virtually everybody finds spam irritating, so don't risk losing your followers and your reputation by getting involved with dirty spam tricks. Bombarding accounts with spam and posting your affiliate link as replies in the hope that people will click on it are strategies best avoided, and in many cases could lead to your Twitter account being suspended.

Build relationships

Many affiliate marketers fail in their Twitter endeavours because they don't recognise the importance of building relationships with their followers. Relationship building leads to trust and integrity forming, so if you want to get people on your side and be influenced by your tweets, then start getting to know your audience.

Being relevant

Many affiliate Twitter users make mistakes because they post random tweets that have no particular relevance to their groups of followers. Not only is this wasting your time, but you will annoy those very people you're trying to win over. If you want to succeed as an affiliate Twitter marketer then a good strategy is to create targeted lists of your followers based on their interests, so you can tweak your tweets to match their interests.

Quality not quantity

Many affiliates using Twitter as a marketing tool have the misconceived notion that there is a direct relationship between success and the number of tweets posted. This isn't really the case, and in fact, it's the quality of your tweets that is more important than how often you post. Certainly, if you start to over-tweet posts for the sake of it, you may end up losing all credibility.

Monitoring and follow up
Any affiliate marketer using Twitter won't gain long-term success if they don't monitor how effective their tweets are in terms of getting the desired results. If you don't use Twitter as a listening device for what your followers like or want, or how effective your marketing efforts are going, then you won't gain as much success.

Be smart with how you use social media. It’s easy to set yourself a few guidelines and stick to them, but it’s also easy to get carried away when you are trying to be successful at affiliate marketing. It can take a long time to build trust and relationships, but no time at all to ruin them.


This great advice was provided by Rohit Singh and the team behind the Seo Newsletter blog. Aside from giving information about Seo Newsletter refunds and the consumer promise, they like to provide advice on affiliate marketing due to their years of experience.