Do You Use This Free Affiliate Marketer’s Tool?

November 21st, 2008 | affiliate basic, affiliate marketing, affiliate tools, niche marketing, viral marketing

Unless you’re living on another planet (and/or haven’t read our earlier post about Twitter) you may or may not be making use of this totally free affiliate marketer’s tool.

The premise around which Twitter is built is a quick text-like chat with your friends. However, don’t think for one moment that business people aren’t using this tool, too.

The problem arises when an affiliate marketer mishandles how he or she goes about twittering.

Your goal is to:

1. Follow individuals who complement what you are doing online but are not direct competitors (every day spend a few minutes searching out other Twitters and choose the button to “follow” them).

2. Get Followers willing to participate in your own threads (starting with #1 is the fastest and easiest way to build on #2).

As your followers and following grows, you must then

3. Ask questions!

Asking questions is the easiest way to get any conversation going. People love having and giving answers (it must be in our genes LOL). Lots of people also have questions they are praying someone will give them the answers to or point them in the right direction

That given, try this technique on your own Twitter, keeping in mind the following:

Keep Questions Relevant

The types of questions you should ask will depend upon the way you normally use Twitter. If you use it in a personal way then almost any question will work but if your use of Twitter is more focused upon exploring a topic or niche, or if you’re using it for business - you’ll want to keep your questions at least somewhat on topic.

Acknowledge Answers

Simply asking questions and ignoring the answers is something I’ve seen a number of Twitter users do as a strategy for building up follower numbers. The problem with this is that it can leave those who answer feeling a little ignored. Of course it is difficult to respond to every person who answers (last time I asked a question on Twitter I had 100 responses - it would have taken over my day to personally respond to each). A few ways of acknowledging answers that go beyond replying individually include:

* a general ‘thanks for your answers’ type tweet

* picking a few responses to retweet and highlight as key answers

* use answers publicly - for example you could pull the answers together and use them (or at least some of them) in a blog post (see below for an example of this)

* summarize findings - for example if you ask people a ‘yes or not’ question tweet the results - eg: ‘13 people said yes they’ve tweeted from the toilet and 16 said that they hadn’t’

These types of responses and acknowledgments show your followers that you value their replies, will help them to see how their responses fit into the overall conversation and will increase the chances that they’ll respond again to future questions.

Be willing to Answer Your own Questions

When I ask a question on Twitter I find that among the answers are usually quite a few ‘what do you think?’ replies. Sharing what you think, have experienced, or what you know is a great way to give your followers insight into who you are. Plus…. being willing to answer your own questions is just polite.

Don’t just Ask them and Run

I made this mistake a few times - a question came to mind just before I was heading to bed so I tweeted it and then signed off for the night. Doing this says to your followers that perhaps you’re not as interested in their answer as they thought. It also means that if people want to clarify your question or unpack it in some way that you’re not there to have a conversation with them.

Next time you consider asking a question on Twitter ask yourself if you have time to interact with your followers for a few minutes (or longer if you have a lot of followers). If you don’t - make a note of the question and ask it later.

Leave Space for Answers and Conversation

This relates to not asking questions and running but the strategy of asking questions to follower becomes so much more effective if you extend the questions into an ongoing conversation. One way to kill this conversation is to follow your question tweet up with another one on a completely different topic.

Some Twitter users I follow tweet so often and on so many different topics that it can be difficult to know how to respond because they’re onto a different topic before you can reply. Take your time, pause, let your followers submit their answers before you move onto a different topic.