Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

Posted by: Nathan Hangen, Guest Blogger

I need to get something out of the way…I am a Twitter fanatic. In fact, it would come as no surprise to me if my wife was spending every free minute she has in order to learn how to become a hacker so that she could take it down and have her husband back (I’m really not that bad, but you get the idea).

So considering that fact that I spend a lot of my time learning how to master the art of Twitter marketing and that I’ve even created my own Twitter products, what I am about to say might be a little too close to the bone…even for me.

However, the truth is the truth and if we try to hide from it, then we end up dying because of it. And here it is:

99% of the affiliate marketers on Twitter have zero idea how to market correctly.

Furthermore, many of those that don’t get it are teaching new users how not to get it too, leading to a cycle of spam, crappy auto-DM’s, and accounts that get suspended or marked as spam before they have even had a chance to flourish.

So, what are they doing, and why are they doing it? Let’s tackle the former first.

1. If you want to sell an affiliate product on Twitter, you cannot expect to be able to do it in 140 characters, and yet, that’s what many marketers try to do. Their Twitter streams are filled with blatant sales pitches, so much so that you start to wonder if there is a real person behind the curtain.

Look, if I don’t know who you are, I don’t know where you are linking to, and I don’t see anything but pitches in your Twitter stream, then I am not going to click through. If I do, if you get lucky, you will see me hit the back button before the page even finishes loading.

2. You cannot take over someone’s DM’s (Direct Messages) and have them send out spam on your behalf. Aside from the fact that it is extremely annoying, it takes advantage of people that don’t know any better. You are actually hurting your customer in the process. Hit-and-run business tactics are shameful and will not help you in the long run.

3. Creating a product that only teaches people how to make money on Twitter by promoting your “make money on Twitter” product is, well, just sad. Sure, you might make a few bucks, but what does that get you? Again, it is this type of short term thinking that turns Twitter into a madhouse and creates an environment where marketers are no longer trusted. At that point, you’ve ruined it for all of us. Thanks.

4. Perhaps the most blatant offender is the reply spammer, which is relatively new to the scene. These people reply to popular Twitter users with an affiliate link, and try to trick people into clicking. These reply spammers also try to trick the popular person’s followers, because at first glance, it looks like the Tweet is coming from them. Considering most of these tweets look identical, I simply click the block button and move on. Get blocked often enough and you’ll be suspended. Good luck getting your account back.

So Why Are They Doing It?

1. Most affiliate marketers on Twitter are doing this because they are too lazy to learn how to effectively sell affiliate products. You shouldn’t try to sell someone in a PPC ad; you bring them to your sales page so that your sales letter can do the selling. It’s the same with Twitter. To do this, though, you’ve got to be relevant, which means that not everything you say can be a sales pitch. When it is, though, it has to address the needs of your list. Sending out blanket replies just doesn’t work.

2. Sadly, many people buy systems that tell them that these methods work. To make matters worse, many of them use viral friend adders that help them get recognition and more marketers promoting their products. Eventually, regardless of how faulty the system is, it spreads like wildfire. Everyone gets caught, no one wins.

3. They aren’t interested in helping people. The last category is comprised of marketers that use the same tactics in other venues. They use software to generate new accounts by the dozens, so they don’t care if they get suspended. They aren’t interested in helping people…they simply want to make an easy buck.

So How Do You Sell on Twitter?

I’ve written about this extensively because it is a matter that I am extremely passionate about. I am tired of shady marketers ruining it for everyone and more importantly, I’m tired of seeing new people get taken advantage of.

So here’s the truth:

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 unfollowed 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.

People love to buy…we love to consume great content. However, we have to be warmed up before we do it. On social networks, it’s the relationships that sell, not the message. It’s really up to you, though. You can spam people and make a quick buck (maybe), or you can build credibility and build a successful business. In my opinion, taking the latter route is much more efficient.

About the Author: Nathan Hangen writes about web entrepreneurship at NathanHangen.com, and about how to use social media to fuel your brand at Making It Social . Follow him on Twitter @nhangen.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Community Manager

Last week, I attended the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas. It’s a great event for learning about the latest advances in online marketing, and is filled with people who are serious and passionate about learning the best methods for achieving online success. Although only a small portion of the event and sessions are geared towards affiliate marketing, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about writing, selling, expanding their sphere of influence, and who wants to make some great networking connections.

While there were a lot of nuts-and-bolts marketing tactics taught at the learning sessions at BlogWorld, there was a recurring theme that popped up in several presenters’ speeches and panels: the importance and power of cultivating relationships.

Without exception, building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with your customers (or potential customers), clients, partners, industry peers, or anyone you’d like to work with, can be the difference between success and failure.

Why You Need to Work on Relationship Building

For a lot of new affiliate marketers, when they first get started, they jump right in to things like writing articles, creating ads, building landing pages, etc. While this is of course very important and necessary, I believe that spending a significant portion of time trying to build relationships can have a far greater long-term impact on potential success.

I’ve met and spoken with quite a few of ClickBank’s top-performing vendors and affiliates, and nearly all of them have connections with other top people in the industry. Some have collaborated on creating a product, some recommend products to their customers from vendors they know and trust, and some form “mastermind” groups to develop strategies and offer each other assistance. Almost no one gets to the top alone, without having received significant help and advice from other people at some point.

Not only is the advice and help you can receive extremely important, but having strong relationships can create opportunities and open doors you didn’t even know existed. It’s the same as it is for job hunting- it’s often not what you know, but who you know. You could end up getting invited to be an exclusive partner for a project, getting tipped off to a fantastic product to promote, or being introduced to other potential partners in your space.

Relationships are About Giving

At BlogWorld, author and marketer Chris Brogan discussed how the only relationships that really work are ones where both parties benefit. This is an extremely important point, and one where I think many people who are trying to create relationships with important people in their space run into problems.

If you’re new to a space, whether it’s affiliate marketing or any other industry with some established experts, immediately begging for help and going straight to the most influential people with requests for personal assistance is probably a bad idea. Best case, you might have someone take pity on you and give you a stock answer they’ve given to a thousand other people and then forget you completely. Worst case, you become a memorable annoyance to them and they do their best to avoid you altogether. Their first impression of you may end up being negative, and it’s hard to overcome this later.

How to Introduce Yourself Without Being Annoying

Instead of immediately asking for help, first become an information sponge and soak up all the information you can about a topic, whether it’s in books or on forums, blogs, Twitter, podcasts, or wherever. If you dedicate a substantial amount of time to just learning about a topic, without trying to first take action, it’s pretty amazing how quickly you can get up to speed and start really participating in the conversation and even helping other people.

Once you feel like you at least understand the conversation and are starting to form an opinion on the topic, starting contributing before you start making requests of people. If you follow an influential blogger in your space, start leaving thoughtful comments on their posts. Give your opinion on the subject, or offer up something you’ve learned in your research that could help others understand the topic better.

As a blogger, I can tell you that there’s nothing more satisfying than receiving comments on a post that show that someone has really thought about what you’ve written and is engaged with your ideas. If your comment shows me you’re really here to participate, and aren’t just commenting to get a link to your site, I’m far more likely to want to know more about you and listen to what you have to say in the future. I’m also a lot more likely to respond if you do ask me a question or make a request of me in the future.

This holds true all the way up from small bloggers to the most influential people in Internet and affiliate marketing. Before you can expect to get anything out of a relationship with people in your industry, you first have to show them that you’re willing to be authentic (don’t pretend to be interested just to get their help) and to give back to the community they’re a part of.

This is especially the case if you want to engage with someone who’s already achieved some success and is too busy to give significant time to every newbie who comes along. You’re going to really have to stand out as someone who’s worth their limited time. A great way to do that is by helping the same people they’re trying to help, and ideally, actually helping them too.

While I certainly can’t guarantee that you’ll develop a great relationship with the person or people you want to work with even if you do everything “right,” your chances of getting respect and becoming an influential person in your space will be much higher. For example, many bloggers and affiliate marketers who are now successful in their own right started out by commenting frequently on blogs or forums in their space. Even if the person you’ve approached doesn’t end up engaging with you, you may find that other people will seek you out and want to work with you, creating opportunities you never knew existed.

For those of you who are hooked on Twitter, you can now follow ClickBank! We’ll be tweeting on a regular basis with updates, interesting sites and articles we’ve run across, and more. See you there!

Follow ClickBank on Twitter!

This is part two of a three-part series by guest blogger and ClickBank publisher Scott Tousignant on using Twitter to increase your ClickBank sales.

Part Two: How to Get Started With Twitter

Step 1: Choose a Name (Twitter ID) and Update Your Avatar and Profile
You should decide whether you want to brand yourself, your persona, or your company’s brand on Twitter. Your decision should be based on who you intend to communicate with on Twitter. You may choose to have a Twitter account for your own name, where you communicate with fellow marketers, and have a separate account for your product brand that you use to communicate with your customers.

It’s important to edit your profile with useful information, such as your blog address and a short blurb about yourself explaining how you can help your target audience. Add a picture to your profile immediately. Using the default Twitter avatar can make you seem like a spammer. When you have an avatar that displays your smiling face, it becomes much more inviting to engage in conversation with you.

Step 2: Begin to Tweet
You can start off by mentioning that you are trying to figure this ‘Twitter thing’ out and then share a bit about yourself. Follow that up with some resourceful tips that would pique the interest of your target audience. It’s a great practice to ask questions in your tweets as well. The feedback you get from your followers will expose you to new ideas and tools you’d never have found on your own.

Step 3: Start Following People
When you follow someone on Twitter, all of their tweets will appear in your timeline.  You will see the discussions they are engaged in, as well as who they are communicating with. You should follow people who share similar interests with you. After all, you need something in common to talk about.

Use the Twitter search tool to find like-minded people to follow. Visit http://search.twitter.com and type in your area of interest. Let’s say that your niche is gardening. Once you type ‘gardening’ into the search box, a list of everyone that has been tweeting about gardening recently will appear. Within that list you’ll find potential customers, as well as other experts in the gardening niche.

In addition to following these individuals, I recommend that you click on their avatar and check out their profile. If they have a link to a blog or Web site, check it out to learn more about them. Then I recommend that you send them a tweet mentioning that you checked out their blog and really enjoyed their recent post, or something along those lines.

You can direct a tweet at someone in one of two ways. You can either direct message them, in which case they will be the only person that views your tweet. Alternatively, you can use the @ symbol and make your tweet public. For example, let’s say the Twitter ID of the person you are sending the message to is ‘gardenguru.’ Your tweet would look something like this: @gardenguru I’m looking forward to learning more about you. Your recent blog post was outstanding!

This tweet would be made public for everyone to see, and because you started off your tweet with the @gardenguru your tweet will appear in the replies section of @gardenguru’s Twitter page. The benefit of making your tweet public, rather than a direct message, is that everyone will see that you are indeed on Twitter to network and aren’t just a self-promoter.

Step 4: Engage in Conversation
When someone posts a question, comment, or statement in a tweet and you have an opinion, share it with them. If ‘gardenguru’ is looking for the best fertilizer to use for his watermelons, you should respond by tweeting: @gardenguru I’ve been growing watermelons for years and found brand x to be the best.

You have now become a resource for ‘gardenguru’ with one simple tweet! Also, other Twitter users will have viewed your useful tweet, making you more of an expert in their eyes.

One of the best ways to learn how to get the most out of Twitter is to follow people who are using it effectively and learn from the conversations that they are having. After you sign up to Twitter, feel free to follow my tweets by visiting www.Twitter.com/TheFitB and clicking on the follow button. Send me a tweet letting me know that you found out about me through the ClickBank community, and be sure to let me know how I can be of help to you.

In my next blog post, I will share the most effective strategies for promoting ClickBank products using Twitter without being seen as a spammer.  Be on the lookout for “Twitter Turn-ons and Turn-offs” soon!

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

This is part one of a three part series by guest blogger and ClickBank publisher Scott Tousignant on using Twitter to increase your ClickBank sales.

Part One: What is Twitter, and How Can It Help Your ClickBank Business?

Social media has quickly become the easiest and fastest method of generating targeted exposure for your ClickBank promotions. Participating in the most effective social networks, and using them correctly, will lead to an increase in conversions and boost your ClickBank sales.

With new social networking sites popping up every day, it can be difficult to determine which ones are worth your investment of time and effort. That’s why today, I’m going to make your life a bit easier. After spending thousands of hours in hundreds of different social networking communities and tracking where my traffic and sales are coming from, I can tell you without a doubt that Twitter has produced the best results for my business.

What Is Twitter, You Ask?

It’s hard to say, really. Twitter means different things to different people. To some people, it’s simply another form of a chat room, public instant messaging, or a virtual water cooler. To others, it’s a place to network with like-minded individuals, connect with customers, and attract joint venture partners.

The technical term that is often used to describe Twitter is ‘micro blogging.’ Each ‘tweet’ is a 140-character blog post. It’s quick and to the point. That’s part of the appeal to many Twitter users, which makes it important for you to understand that you need to provide value within each tweet that you make.

Why Should You Use Twitter?

Connect with Customers and Joint Venture Partners
Twitter allows me to build trust and enhance the relationship that I have with my customers. It’s one more way that I can erase any skepticism they may have in regards to my credibility and the value of my products.

Twitter has also become the easiest and fastest way for me to connect with industry leaders. There have been times where dozens of emails and phone calls failed to reach my prospective JV partner, but one simple tweet did the trick.

Increase Traffic to your Blog and Web Sites
When you are posting valuable content in your tweets and becoming a resource to your followers on Twitter, you can guarantee that they will be clicking on links in your profile and eagerly looking to learn more from you.

When you create a blog post, it is acceptable to announce it on Twitter. Having a catchy title and intriguing first few words of the post will increase click-throughs to your blog post. I recommend that you automate your blog posts to appear as tweets by using Twitterfeed.

Another example of leveraging Twitter is inviting your followers on Twitter to listen in on Webcasts where you are interviewing an expert in your niche.

Get More Incoming Links to your Site

Each tweet is its own unique page on the Web. When you include links to your blog posts, product review pages, or Web sites, you are receiving inbound links to each of those sites. Incoming links mean more traffic, both from direct visits and improved rankings in search engines.

Hopefully this post has given you a good introduction to Twitter and how it can help you grow your ClickBank business. In Part Two, I’ll show you the basics of getting started with Twitter, as well as the steps you need to take early on to be as successful as possible. Stay tuned!

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