A truth that comes straight from the horses mouth so to speak.
Though I’ve often thought the vast majority of affiliate marketers don’t have a Twitter marketing clue, I quickly grew bored 
with the bash the marketer blog posts that appeared like a rash. And I did all I could to avoid the marketers and followers that greeted me with a cheeky DM sending me “peace” in the form of – wait for it – an affiliate link!
I found an entertaining and well written article via my Clickbank Newsletter and, thinking it worth sharing here, went in search of the actual blog post on the Clickbank blog so I could link to the full article.
The post is called How not to use Twitter for affiliate marketing and makes some excellent points about the affiliate marketers who don’t know how to market on Twitter and end up annoying everyone with their “spam-line” activities. In that way it goes beyond the “I hate all marketers on Twitter” variety of posts one usually comes across.
Not only do 99% of the affiliate marketers on Twitter not know how to market correctly, they tell their own affiliates how to do it the wrong way too. Even without seeing this in the Clickbank blog, I know this to be true. I’ve seen many marketers through their communications tell their affiliates to immediately stick their affiliate link on Twitter – anywhere and everywhere they think they can get a sale. The thing is – you can’t just push your link out to people who are not warmed up to you first and your offer second. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
But like Nathan Hangen says in his guest post, you cannot expect to market an affiliate product in 140 characters. Can’t be done. Sending out regular affiliate link blasts into people’s stream or by DM - to people who don’t know you – and whom you can’t be bothered to get to know will get you marked as one thing – a spammer.
Constant Stream of pitches
Sometimes Twitter streams are so full of marketing pitches (like ALL the time) that, like the writer, you really do wonder if there is a person behind the tweets. And, as the author says, now marketers are getting other people to tweet their links too – even worse. By the way, while we are talking about affiliate links here, this is by no means limited to affiliate marketers. There are plenty of non-affiliate marketers doing the exact same thing. Always tweeting marketing stuff, never anything else, or very rarely anything else. But back to the affiliate marketers for the moment.
Points of interest in Nathan’s post:
The reply spammer – I’d seen this but didn’t know there was a name for them. I never clicked the links. I just block.
Inherent laziness – the marketers can’t be bothered to get to know their audience, build a relationship and find out if that audience has a need. Yes, it takes time, but you can’t just throw links at people and expect a long-term result.
The software “friend adders” bought to add thousands of followers – and increase their reach. Beguiled by the notion that thousands of followers means instant recognition, they get ever larger numbers of people promoting their products.
The marketers buy software to add several accounts… so getting suspended isn’t something they worry too much about.
True solid marketing first and foremost must aim to help your prospects and customers not simply make a quick dollar. Sadly making a quick dollar is all some seem to want to do.
As the article says – there is nothing inherently wrong about selling on Twitter per se. In fact, to quote Nathan Hagen:
If you want to sell on Twitter, you have to build relationships and create targeted lists based on interests. Once you learn how to build these networks (which really is easy to do), you can link to relevant affiliate offers without having to worry about getting un-followed or blocked. The key is to let the content, not a Tweet, do the selling. If everything you say on Twitter is a pitch of some sort, it won’t work. However, if you learn to be relevant and helpful, your random pitch will not only be noticed, but will be appreciated.
The unfortunate thing is that Twitter is fast becoming a stream of noisy pitches (affiliate and other) with spam connotations and almost zero content and relationship.
The choice is yours, either take the time and build relationships with people in the Twitter community (and teach your affiliates to do the same) or be labelled as a spammer and continue being a royal pain to everyone.
By the way, one of the best ways to build relationships with your market is to have an email newsletter that’s packed full of valuable content. But that, of course, is a lot more work than many want to do.
Check out Nathan’s article here:
How not to use Twitter for affiliate marketing
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
How true. Thankful for unfollow, block and report as spam. Some people give up on Twitter because of these spammy marketers.
“you have to build relationships” – yes, in Twitter and in life
Couldn’t agree more. I seem to get many followers every day and the first thing is a link promoting some affiliate product mostly.
The sad part is maybe some of the messages I get offer some value but I don’t even look unless it is from someone I really know.
What good is having 5000 followers if no one reads your posts anyway.
@john – more and more it seems that people only follow people on Twitter to promote something to them.Better to have 100 followers you have some relationship with than 5,000 followers who just tweet and DM their marketing links all the time.
@Leora – yes… trouble is they just set up new accounts. Sadly the relationship building aspect is yet to be appreciated by some affiliate and other marketers. Thanks for commenting!
This is so very true. I have the same problem, lots of followers but not a lot of helpful information. Thank you for sharing this.
Completely agree with you. I get loads of follows which I often reciprocate only to get an immediate direct message asking me to check some website selling something. I have never checked even one site so far and quite honestly have stopped following people who send a follow request to me.