Affiliate Trust

twitter - Follow and Followed Alike…

I’ve found that for a given topic, affiliate marketing in this case, you can find a lot of good quality tweeps associated with the topic, and follow them expecting a ROF (Return On Follow) of new followers. I originally did this with the AffiliateTrust account and was stopped in my tracks at the wall with 2001 follows. The wall is twitter’s limit to following without an equal number of followers. The followers began accruing and after a few months of not following anyone new, sort of topped out at about 1750. Wanting to get over that 2001 wall and being so close, I decided to go for it. But how?

I’ve thought about using twitter apps that prune out follows who aren’t following back, but want a little more control over the process. Recently twitter added the new feature that places buttons for context menus on each follower and followed in your lists. I looked for a way to determine which of the followed are followers by examining the menu in the followed list. I found that ones following me had a DM option that was absent from ones not following. So I simply went down the list and un-followed most of the non-followers.

There were a couple problems that came up…

I found that the context menu covered up the next button in the list when using Firefox. To speed up removing hundreds of followed, I started at the bottom of the list rather than the top to overcome this.

The second was that removing people caused the page to backfill when advancing to the next page. This meant that I had to go back a page over and over to continue removal. To solve this I found the very last page of the followed list. How did I do it? Look at the address of the page. There will be a page number for the page you’re on. Divide your followed total by 20 and round up. Enter that as the page number to go directly to the last page. Then begin at the bottom of the last page and work your way backwards through the list.

I removed about a thousand followed yesterday which freed me to add new followers and I added about 800 in two separate session. After the first session of additions my followers suddenly dropped off to 1750. I don’t know why. All I can come up with is that I may have removed some followed that happen to have been following me. In any case, this meant I now had to gain 250 users to get over that wall instead of the original 150.

Where did I find ones to follow? I picked a tweep connected with Internet/affiliate marketing who has over 24,000 followers. I figured these would be well targeted for the topic. So I opened his follower list and went to work. This is actually easier than it sounds. I simply went down the list clicking follow follow follow… I wanted to be a little more selective though, so I skimmed the tweeps and primarily selected ones that were obviously personal accounts with portrait avatars and real names. I quickly began to notice patterns in some of the accounts and realized that a huge percentage of this persons followers were spammers. There were many relating to escort and dating services so I avoided most accounts with pretty girl avatars. No wonder he had over 24k followers!

After a few hours of work I hit last nights follower goal of 1900 at about 1:00AM, then went to bed. The followers were accruing at about two a minute. I expected to get over the wall by the time I got up.

Sure enough! This morning the count was right at 2090 and is now at 2120 and still climbing. Oh man, just realized that now that I’m over the wall, I’ve got another thousand to go after.

I’m not claiming that this technique will work for all twitter accounts. Like affiliate marketing, your twitter account will need to provide some value for your followers. And for longevity you should target tweeps that will be receptive to your message. You won’t meet these goals with the rampant “400 followers immediately” schemes. It takes work. Then, once you have a large audience, with carefully composed and balanced pitches, you can reach thousands…

And “pitches” is a topic for another day…

AffililateTrust.org
Forum.AffiliateTrust.org

Now The twitter Rush …

There was the gold rush, then the Internet rush, and now the twitter rush. I’m reminded of the early days of the Internet. Remember when domain names were free to register as many as you wanted? And to publish anything that remotely resembled commercialism was looked on with disdain? Had the pundits won out we would still be reading science journals and thesi in static form with gray backgrounds. So goes a market driven society where demand shapes services and drives development. Participating in an active marketing forum tends to keep one on the cutting edge of the latest fads and raves as they ebb and flow. So this twitter thing began coming up in conversation. Statements that such and such twittered this or tweeted that [or chirped... oh, pardon me] were heard, but any sort of standard terminology seemed to escape many. So what is this new service that turns an adult business professional into a twit… uh… tweeter? It’s twitter, the so called micro-blogging platform, where you say in 140 characters or less, what you’re up to… as if most people would care. It’s the latest pet rock phenomenon. No, it’s a pet rock that talks back… sometimes. More often though, tweeps [twitter peeps?] talk to themselves. And even more intriguing is that hundreds, if not thousands of other tweeps follow them around listening to them talk to themselves. Well, I sound knowledgeable enough that it almost sounds like I’ve taken the twitter plunge… on my own defense, I resisted, clawing the floor, kicking and screaming. Some of the AT members insisted that resistance was futile. And thus I was dragged in. I had been successful for so long in avoiding that time pit called twitter, but now find that the gravity is too great for any firm stance. I’m not convinced that such a service will produce any sort of profound social benefit for it’s users, but I do recognize a market represented by this growing society of tweeps that’s skyrocketing into huge numbers. The jury is still out in how twitter will monetize their service, but they’ve let it be known that there are no restrictions on user’s commercialization of it. This leads to the next question, how can we leverage the service for the benefit of our businesses? About the Internet rush and those free domain names that have faded from our memories, same goes for twitter usernames. twitter has rules in place to prevent them from becoming a commodity. But, if you want names that relate to you and your business, better move quickly… even if you currently have no interest in twitter. There are continuing discussions in the Affiliate Trust forum about using twitter to market and profit. Join us for this next great rush… Forum.AffiliateTrust.org