Promote ClickBank Products Using Twitter: Part Three
November 14th, 2008
This is the final part of a three-part series by guest blogger and ClickBank publisher Scott Tousignant on using Twitter to increase your ClickBank sales. We suggest reading Part One and Part Two if you haven’t already.
Part Three: Twitter Turn-Ons and Turn-Offs
Twitter is all about conversing and building relationships with like-minded people, whether they are customers or joint venture partners. If you are using Twitter for blatant self-promotion, you may make some sales of the ClickBank products that you promote, but you will quickly be ignored by the Twitter community and lose out on the massive benefits that Twitter has to offer.
In my previous two posts, I shared the reasons why you should use Twitter as a means of promoting ClickBank products, as well as how to get started. Today I’ll share the most effective strategies for incorporating your promotions through Twitter, including the most important “Do’s” and “Don’ts.”
Your goal in using Twitter should be to become a valued resource in your niche. Ideally, you’ll become a resource for both potential customers and other experts in your niche. Offering a little bit of help can go a long way toward this goal. On the other hand, if all you do is include links to products in every tweet, you are setting yourself up for failure.
So how do you strike the perfect balance between promoting ClickBank products and providing useful information on Twitter? Understanding these fundamentals can mean the difference between turning on customers and joint venture partners and turning them off. Let’s start with the “don’ts” of Twitter.
Twitter Turn-Offs
- Every tweet that you do has a link to a product or your blog posts.
- Not engaging in any form of conversation. If I visit your Twitter profile page and I don’t see any form of conversation with other Twitter users, it’s likely that I won’t follow you because I can see you’re not really participating in the community.
- You are still using the default Twitter avatar. This gives the sense that you could be a Twitter spam-bot, rather than a real person.
- You are following 2,000 people and only 10 people are following you. If you have followed that many people and only a handful have followed you back, it’s proof enough for me that you are not a useful resource.
- Neglecting to respond when someone begins a conversation with you. If you visit your replies box and see that I asked how your recent product promotion was going and you don’t respond to me, chances are that I will not try to engage in conversation with you again.
Twitter Turn-Ons
- An inviting profile page, including a vibrant avatar picture of yourself and an intriguing bio that makes me want to learn more about you.
- You are engaging in conversation 80 percent of the time. If I visit your profile page and see that the majority of your tweets begin with @twittername, it’s a sign that you are regularly communicating with others.
- Sharing resources. I once heard someone refer to Twitter as a global Rolodex. It’s a place to discover amazing resources that are working for others. Join in the sharing. When you come across a helpful tool or service, let your followers on Twitter know about it. They’ll look to you in the future as a good resource, increasing your stature in their minds.
- Twitter Shout Outs! This can be done in many ways. If you really enjoy my tweets, do a tweet yourself, saying, “If you are not following @TheFitB do so now, he’s a great fat loss resource.” You’d better believe that you’ll catch my attention with that and get some reciprocation.
This last point is one of the biggest potential benefits of Twitter, so I’ll explain it a little more thoroughly. What do you think would happen if I responded in a tweet, saying, “@yourtwitterid I appreciate your kind words, I see that you are an expert in my niche as well. It’s great to see you helping others succeed.” I’ll tell you what would happen. You would get a bunch of my followers following you!
You may not be able to get a guru in your niche to send out an email promotion for your product to their list, but when you use Twitter effectively, you can get them to bring their followers’ attention to you and the work that you do.
How To Incorporate Promotions Into Your Tweets Without Turning People Off
If you follow the 80/20 rule, you’ll do just fine. If you restrict promotions to just 20 percent of your tweets, your chances of turning those tweets into sales are much greater. One key reason is trust. Another key reason is that you have proven to be a useful resource with your free advice. If your tips have helped them out and you are now recommending that your followers check out a product that would be helpful to them, chances are good that they will click on it.
I spend most of my time engaging in conversation, and then when it’s time for me to work out, I’ll post a tweet mentioning that I’m about to hit the gym for a great workout and provide a link to a blog post review that I did for that workout program. I don’t send them directly to a sales page through my ClickBank link. I provide them with more information to help them decide if the workout program that I’m following would be the right fit for them as well. At that point, they can click on my ClickBank affiliate link to check out the program. Chances are much higher that they will purchase at this point than if I had just posted a link to a pitch page with no explanation.
Sometimes Twitter users will come right out and ask if anyone knows of a great product to solve a certain problem. This is a great opportunity to share your affiliate link for a product that you believe would be of great help to them. The more respected you are as a resource to your Twitter followers, and the more trust you earn from them, the greater the chance that they will purchase the products you recommend.
Be sure to return the favor, as well. If you purchase a product because someone recommended it to you, be sure to tweet them and let them know. I have discovered some pretty awesome products because of people I’m following on Twitter. I let them know that they deserve the commission for helping me make a wise purchasing decision.
Twitter really is a worldwide Rolodex at your fingertips. It will help you and your business in more ways that you can imagine. Use it effectively, and you can harness the power of its true potential.
Scott Tousignant of www.unstoppablefatloss.com harnesses the power of social media to help bring him closer to his goal of reversing the nationwide obesity trend by 2015. Connect with Scott by following him at www.Twitter.com/TheFitB
About Beau BlackwellBeau is the Client Knowledge Guru for ClickBank and covers the latest trends, tips and techniques for building profitable Internet marketing businesses.
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Outstanding article. I especially like the Twitter turn offs and turn ons. Very concise list.
Kathleen Gage
Vety good info. on Twitter. I had checked it out in the past but never really gave it much thought. What you say makes good sense, I’m goint o check it out now to see if it will help my online ventures.
very nice articles on Twitter, I’m going to check it out now to see if it will be worthwhile.
This are the best product in the world selling market were you get what your mind is looking for
simply the best
Great series. I am an avid user of Twitter, and I know it has contributed to my bottom line.
I have to say I am a little disappointed in the configuration of this blog. There is no place for a commenter to place their website URL, which pretty much goes against every part of Web2 philosophy and business modeling.
In addition, it prevents newer Clickbank users from establishing credible authority backlinks from Clickbank. When they make a sale, CB gets paid too, right?
It is not long ago that my SEO put me ahead of Clickbank on Google for the term Clickbank, and when I was asked for an outbound link to Clickbank by Clickbank, I obliged happily, long before there was a Web2 at all, but in support of the concept.
Clickbank would do well to practice a little of what is being preached in here, and perhaps listen to a few people that have been making a living in affiliate marketing for years, and certainly since the beginning of CB.
Clickbank is correct in indicating that vendors would do well to attract affiliates with all sorts of baubbles and tools. Perhaps it would do well for CB to produce an affiliate tool wizard or affiliate support template page on the CB system.
I would recommend also the ability to support multiple landing pages, and the glaring obvious need for an affiliate’s ability to “opt-in” to be contacted by vendors of his choice.
These are very basic, simple to code. Some error trapping for when the CB boxes are busy would be good too, rather than the cold message given to shoppers now when the CB system hangs. Simple stuff.
Keep up the great work! CB helped me retire very well, and though I prefer to remain outside the limelight, it is nice to see so many people I have trained on CB doing well with it over the past 6 or 7 years.
Ron
Twitter is a great tool for building traffic for your clickbank promotions, but you really have to be careful and actually provide some value when you are posting tweets.
I agree with some of the commentors above that in order for clickbank to really provide some value for affiliates and vendors, there needs to be a bit more flexibility within the hop structure.
Great tips. I haven’t had the best luck with Twitter. Too much spamming there too of other affiliates that bombards the same message over and over again.
hey this sounds like a really great idea but i was wondering how exactly do i get followers on twitter?
Good post, but whether it will be useful for me? I’ll see you later, after I practice, is in an active social life of society and we should care about what is going on with someone, then provide solutions that can be limited to what we can give. (Sorry if my English language is less good, I’m from Indonesia and reading your posts with a translator).
This is one area of social marketing that I haven’t exactly ‘grasped’ – yet. There are certainly more than a few pointers I’ve taken from your article. Great work and thank you for taking the time to put it together.
I REALLY ENJOYED THIS
Im new to Twitter and Click bank, But i’m now going to try to take all I know and use it to finally get some traffic. I am the flipcameraman, on twitter the reason i selected that name was that I was turned on the a flip mimo camera, from and internet friend , it was the best thing i ever got. Just shoot a video , and who like magic to You Tube postings. I responce to a preceeding question, i was turned onto a great follow system by Tamir
and now have close to 8,000 followers that want to learn more about video and new future gaggetts on the web. Follow me and i will follow you ,has been the twitter code. But it has worked well to gain followers, now if i can actually get twitter 20-80 system to work , i will be well pleased . PS you did 3 great articals , it helped me a lot, i will follow a man like you that wants to help others . I’m almost 70 , but still loving web 2.0 twitter, now an click bank. Thanks Willy Orbison.
I like the fact that you emphasized the point of building relationships and following the 80/20 rule. But I think it’s just as important to point out that the FTC requires all affiliate or promoted links to be clearly disclosed. This can be accomplished by simply adding a hashtag such as “#ad” or “#aff” to your tweet.
cheers, extraordinary guidelines to affiliates who use twitter. yes thanks a lot