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For some reason when I was editing we ended up with a much smaller image than before, but as I have more videos coming uploading and publishing as it is. The sound is a little poppy as well as I boosted it maybe too much.

To be honest those 2 million indexed search results pages are just a drop in the ocean compared to the total number of pages, & what Google tells you externally, whether .com or .co.uk rarely are the same as what they tell you in Webmaster tools.

Another interesting point of reference are the 48,000 pages on Twitter indexed discussing Viagra and where to purchase it, though some of those probably point to malicious sites.

Current linking structure helps rank porn pills and casino spam accounts that have been around for a year – who’s commercial interest?

Please note: With the next 2 videos I am going to take it up a gear, look at the linking structure of individual profiles and how to maximise your Twitter SEO.

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• TwitterAdder – Software Specification (10)
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• Have you ever had a thought and shared it on Twitter without writing it down?
• Had a disagreement with someone over something they tweeted?
• Shared a link through a retweet but didn’t yourself bookmark it?
• Forgot to note down who has shared your content a lot in the past who might deserve some reciprocation?

I can remember when Friendfeed was first introduced and one of the primary reasons to use Friendfeed was as a searchable backup of what you said on Twitter.
Unfortunately it still isn’t very good at finding every mention of one of your blog posts.

I don’t believe Twitter has the resources to come up with a better search engine than Google for their content.

As you will see in later videos, Twitter has barriers in place that actually prevent indexing.

At time of writing, Google’s indexation of tweets only goes back as far as Mid October 2009 – here are 2 searches on tweets from that period.
Example 1
Example 2
Go back to the beginning of October and valuable tweets aren’t even picked up on my personal Blogcatalog pages, but they still appear on tag pages for long-tail terms.
Example 3

I am glad my content gets syndicated (with permission) by Blogcatalog, otherwise it wouldn’t exist any more.

It is not just Blogcatalog – here is one only Favstar remembers

“10 Tips to Optimise your LinkedIn Profile http://bit.ly/FKU0n”

I am going to give my Andy Beard profile there a boost with a link as otherwise content might get lost.

My 7 Day Ultimatum to Twitter is deadly serious – many people effectively use Twitter as their only sharing/bookmarking service.

On a daily basis I find myself searching Gmail often for information from 4 years ago – Gmail has never failed me, and one of the advantages of Google Buzz (my profile), despite the “noise” (mainly from tweets & Friendfeed cross syndication) is that any contribution you make will be findable a year from now.

Here is a link to any conversation for this post on Buzz

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But I am giving Twitter a chance… 7 days

Last time I decided to leave a community where I was highly active was actually 2 years ago when I left Sphinn over moderation issues – at the time I was in the top 3 users. I haven’t been actively involved there since.
(note: I will be releasing the premium content I was discussing for free sometime in the next few weeks as those I told have had a nice 2 year window to exploit it – I never charged for the info)

2 years ago Sphinn was pretty much my default “misc” feed reader – in some ways Twitter has replaced it – you know… that place you go to read cool stuff you wouldn’t have otherwise seen because you can’t cope with reading everything.

The Final Straw For Twitter

Twitter have been progressively screwing up their SEO for a few years, but sometime early this morning they took it one stage too far.
It was first noted by Jeff Bentley
who is a dodgy search marketer so obviously I trust linking to him a lot more than linking to Twitter where you can’t trust the links.

It was also spotted by Malcolm before I published a few other tweeters – he wasn’t going mad, but I probably am.

What Twitter are saying in this most recent change is that the people I associate with and have regular conversations with on Twitter are not to be trusted, and that all juice should go to their blogroll icons in the sidebar which are the people I most recently followed – really funny with accounts that autofollow people back is that most of the blogroll links on their accounts are to spammers.

There are people I follow purely for competitive intelligence or communication – some of them I would never link to from this blog or would nofollow, but on Twitter it is just too inconvenient to use other methods.

I realise Twitter content when syndicated can result in followed links, after all I have been pimping my Tweetglide blog (which has 6x as many tweets indexed in Google as my Twitter account) and if I was to feed tweets to my account on Google Buzz, they would be clean links there as well (though maybe they don’t pass juice)

I also realise now content is being piped directly to Google from Twitter, that whether it has nofollows in public might not have any negative effect on the ranking benefit of any links to content, because Google is gaining clean data.

However I find Twitter favouring the links in the sidebar over the links to people I talk to insulting.

The thing is now Twitter are giving data to Google, Google have no interest at all in crawling Twitter in a traditional manner.

A cache date of over 10 days ago for a PR6 site is quite frankly laughable.
You can see very clearly that in that screenshot the links between people I am talking to don’t have a nofollow.

Every time I look at the Twitter website all the nofollow links make me want to vomit.

Deletion?

I have thought about it for the last 8 hours and it is the only viable solution – if I maintain the account then people will use it to contact me, it is prominently in the SERPs and I have close to 8000 organic followers (I never autofollowed, offered incentives etc)
I will probably leave the account live, but I will delete all the people I am following and all the tweets and then post something generic pointing people to appropriate pages such as my contact page.

All Or Nothing Twitter

If Twitter want to nofollow, it should be all the links or none of them – yes all those “blogroll” links and links to lists need to be nofollowed as well. They could go all the way and nofollow everything with nofollow in the header, but that would be extreme.

The alternative is to remove nofollow completely and let Google sort it out by themselves… they are good at that.

2 very simple acceptable options

Most likely you may want to follow me on Google Buzz, as I expect my Twtter account to become an empty corpse in 7 days

Twitter Nofollow conversation on Buzz

Testing

Here is a link to a public Buzz indexing test I am running – I have others running in private

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When they decided to close all loopholes in creating an active link within the bio area, it prevented me linking to my disclosure policy – that annoyed me as well, especially with all the terrible attempts of providing adequate disclosure within paid tweets that are currently being used/proposed.
There was a huge outcry from the SEO community.

Rae ripped both @MattCutts & @ev apart
Andy Beal asked “Was this Twitter bending over for Google?”

Matt Cutts came back with a decent response on how his interchange with @ev went that might have influenced Twitter’s decision to nofollow bio links.

But that really didn’t satisfy anyone, for instance there was this comment by Danny Sullivan.

Here is an excerpt

Forget the bio link, I think the web site link should be regular. Actually, I think all the links should carry weight. Twitter is my microblog. Why can’t I point at what I want to with authority, just like I do with a regular blog. If my twitter home page has earned a good PR score because people point at me, then I’ve done what Google wants — provided good content that earned that value, just like with a real blog.

Then of course there are the Twitter “blogrolls” which used to link unfairly to the early Twitter adopters by default, and now list the most recent people someone is following.
That PageRank score for many was because they were early adopters followed by other early adopter. In many cases people didn’t truely “earn” the PageRank passing links they were receiving.
The new system to be quite honest isn’t very good either, though I suppose Twitter could claim they optimize the system for those who follow 30 others.

Even so Twitter ranks highly for vanity searches due to the internal linking, but the content you create just disappears into a black hole of terrible navigational structure.

Apparently I have tweeted 4656 times over the last few years, and whilst I had an account very early, it probably took a year before I was tweeting on a regular basis.

I haven’t gamed followers, just handled things quite naturally following people who I found interesting and engaged me in conversation.

Despite ranking highly for vanity searches like [Andy Beard], Twitter SEO really sucks.

Google has only picked up 1320 of my historical tweets

Even worse only 8 or 9 pages depending on whether you use /* or AOL are likely to be in Google’s primary index.

You also can’t rely on Twitter’s own internal search to find your historical tweets.

One option taken by many is to use a WordPress blog to archive their tweets, which is a fairly good solution. There are also tons of other microblogging platforms which can be used for syndication of Tweets, or even the origination point, but many have various problems similar to Twitter, or have limited financial resources to stay alive unless they heavily monetize your content.

The option I have taken is to use Tweetglide as I wrote about recently in my initial Tweetglide review

My interest with Tweetglide isn’t the AIR application, though I did pay for an upgrade and I will be doing a lot of testing of the advertising potential in the future – my initial testing was interesting but a little biased due to the topics and Tweetglide was a “new shiny object” thus had tons of new users, and very few had worked out how to use the advertising yet.
I was seeing unrealistic traffic, effectively $0.015 per visitor.

Not that the AIR application isn’t pretty good – it is, and also has some geeky aspects that are quite exciting for developers with an upcoming API that allows you to create addon features.
However on a day-to-day basis I am more inclined to just open a web browser. I have never run any Twitter AIR application extensively.

Tweetglide SEO – Pumper Or Index Engine

Anyone who is in Stompernet will know about pumper sites, but I am sure it will be covered extensively in Link Liberation / SEO Brain Trust, and Howie Schwartz covers this kind of thing with interlinking of Web 2.0 sites and other content in Link Wheels.
Lots of courses cover similar topics though often with slightly different strategies, levels of automation etc.

Whilst not everything I have suggested to the Tweetglide development team has been implemented yet, they have done a huge amount of work in quite a short amount of time.

I am not going to go into all of the details of what has been done and the reasons why, or elaborate too much on what will hopefully be done in the future.

The most important things for SEO, especially for any Google engineers listening in

• Isolation – each Tweetglide blog is on a subdomain now rather than a page on the parent domain. This for me was important from a trust perspective. Any link on a Tweetglide blog is effectively there because the author added it editorially.
  Maybe you will get situations where some people are selling sponsored tweets and there may need to be some detection of known hashtags to add nofollows, but give the devs a chance – no one else syndicating tweets would even think about the need to do that.
  My Tweetglide blog is isolated from other Tweetglide blogs unless I am interlinking through conversation, citation etc.

  This is something that was vital to have Tweetglide behave like Blogspot or wordpress.com – Twitter stupidly didn’t use subdomains from the start, I suppose they could switch and do tons of 301 redirects.

• Pancake – I love pancakes here in Poland, normally with cottage cream cheese and a sauce made from blended frozen strawberries – I also SEO websites to have a flat linking structure to encourage crawling of as much content as possible.
  Tweetglide is pretty flat – flatter than most blogs and it shows in the way it is already being indexed.

What difference does this make?

Tweetglide has only been running for just over a month, and they haven’t pulled in backdated tweets, so the total number of pages on my Tweetglide Blog is 252 – actually that indexation has only really happened in the last 2-3 weeks due to the switch to subdomains.

The number of pages in the primary index varies a lot more between /* (50) and AOL (21-22) but is still already significantly more than achieved on Twitter, and it is early days yet.

My results are probably not typical at this stage, because I wanted to compare with my Twitter account I poured a lot of juice from my sidebar into my Tweetglide blog for the last few weeks.

Search traffic at this stage has been almost zero, but that is what I expected – there are some things that will improve that for the long-term, but a Tweetglide blog needs to be treated as any other index driver / pumper and given some love.

The important part is that pages are being indexed and hopefully that will continue.

There are bugs – I actually just noticed one more with the RSS feeds – the title for each item in the feed needs to be taken from the tweet, otherwise when syndicated the anchor text will always be Item #1 for the newest tweet.
Other stuff the team are already aware of such as the need for feed discovery.

When you sign up, if you say you are an online marketer you will be offered various advertising options – if you take up the offer I get an affiliate commission. If you say you are not interested in marketing, you won’t get the offers on signup and just get to use both the AIR application and Tweetglide blog for free.

But that isn’t why I am promoting Tweetglide

Currently when a blog post gets tweeted, there is a ton of link activity, but most of it is pointless – sure there is some link equity passed between Twitter profiles, but I have already demonstrated how worthless that is.

Most sites syndicating Twitter content have messed up SEO from an author’s perspective – there isn’t a strong symbiotic relationship.

With Tweetglide the links have value… every single damn one of them. You have links between profiles that actually help with Tweetglide blog indexation, links directly to content from multiple subdomains that are real editorial votes, and once that minor bug with the RSS feeds gets fixed those RSS feeds will be great for further syndication.
The RSS feeds have the links in as well. Perfect for your link wheels, juicers, pumpers or however else you are mixing your content.

Google is free to take every Tweetglide blog based upon it’s own merit, just like a subdomain of blogspot.com or wordpress.com

My primary motivation promoting Tweetglide (and helping them with some SEO tips) is to help people but in so doing help myself as it sure doesn’t hurt having a few hundred readers signed up to Tweetglide who subsequently tweet the occasional one of my posts, or just strike up a conversation with me, as all those links count.

Disclaimer: Only Google decide which links count and even if they appear in webmaster tools that doesn’t really mean anything – I haven’t done statistical testing of the links – my personal understanding and intention is that they will be solid “whitehat” editorial links and nothing I suggested as far as SEO tweaks, or that Tweetglide are doing to my knowledge could be looked on as “naughty”

Marketers:- If you do upgrade, it is best to drive traffic to pages that contain some kind of specific desired action/goal, and it isn’t hard to tag any links from Tweetglide advertising with a tracking code.

SEOs:- Tweetglide Blogs just like other pages won’t be indexed by Google if you don’t link to them

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I am saying this as someone who even considered hiring some developers to make an app, or picking up a dying project and adding some viral life to it. There are ways to leverage the Twitter application market that will be attractive.

Before Mike really started selling information products, he had a huge amount of success with viral marketing applications many of which are still alive and generating revenue and traffic 4 years later.

See that second bar? Those are paid ads, though the more real tweets you post, the more ad credits you earn, but the amount you can earn is limited to 1 ad credit every 3 hours.
That is there for a reason – advertising is meant to be valuable.

The aim is also to clean up the Twitter stream that is currently plagued with people promoting stuff, especially marketers. Permission to see an agreed amount of advertising is a much better alternative, and if Mike has got his math right, lots of people will see those adverts.

Advertising is relatively cheap depending on how many see your advert and click – too many factors to speculate on now – I know I have got a ton of advertising credits to use from paid upgrades – Tweetglide is something I willingly paid to upgrade just to check it out.

Serious reasons to use Tweetglide

Take a look at my Tweetglide blog – Andy Beard on Tweetglide

It doesn’t look very special at this time, very much like your normal Twitter page

However Tweetglide isn’t a black hole of link equity – no link condoms.

At the same time there is no enforced blogroll – just because I follow someone doesn’t make it an endorsement, whereas normally when I link from Twitter it is an endorsement – that strange parallel of Twitter I have never been comfortable with – it has sucked for too long.

Tweetglide also supports long length tweets over 140 characters – they need a little bit of improving, but if you just have something quick to say, it is useful.

SEO By Andy Beard

Well kind of….

Over the weekend I exchanged a lot of long emails with Mike over the SEO shortcomings – I can see his team have already picked up a lot of what I suggested in just the rushed 2 days before launch, and my hope is that they will implement the whole of my “12 point list” of major structural changes to the site.

There are a few more tweaks I could add to the list, and as the site settles down I will add those to the suggestions.

I am probably too modest about my achievements with SEO and large user generated content sites, but as of yesterday I am pretty sure I will now helped 2 sites reached the Alexa Top 500 from modest beginnings, and it would be great to make Tweetglide a hat-trick.

The roadmap Mike now has for Tweetglide will make the blogs valuable properties with a flat architecture ideal for deep indexing – this is important as a lot of the information within the extended 140+ Tweets would otherwise just disappear.

As a property for reputation management, Tweetglide is going to rock – if nurtured correctly I am quietly confident it can replace Twitter in my own SERPs.

Serious Flexibility

I just spent 5 minutes on some obvious customization that isn’t possible with your normal Twitter page, I am sure there are a bunch more possibilities.

So there is a bunch of javascript widgets, static links with anchor text or call to action.

I bet I can get an autoresponder in there no problem

Popups? Exitpops? No idea, but seems like fun.

I have no idea how secure this is… Blogger has somehow been able to allow all these things for years, for some reason WP.com can’t handle it, but you would think the team who created blogger, who now work on Twitter would be able to add a little more flexibility.

Tracking?

This says it all

Monetization?

I haven’t tried, but I bet all kinds of advertising widgets plus Google Adsense will work.

No Custom CSS

This is all new, I am sure lots more flexibility will come for custom designs

Big Negative

Whilst I have been assured this is going to be fixed soon, currently Mike has Viral Inviter on the back end. I know Mike has taken action to nudge the devleoper over the issues, and Norman dropped by and left a comment yesterday to go over viral inviter new features.
I would suggest not using the tell-a-friend for now… Mike does have a large development team but this site is beta, going to be gaining a lot of attention, and any risk with a Gmail password is too much…

The rest of the site? Seriously much better than I expected, with a lot more long-term potential.

This is a referral link Andy Beard’s Referral Link and I think other links to the blog will count as that as well, and even search engine traffic.
I did encourage Mike to make everything “coupon” based just like all the web2.0 startups but the links are referral links for now.

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In contrast, whist everyone seems to enthuse about how real-time Twitter is, their system handling malware is such a delayed knee-jerk reaction that it should just be removed as a total failure.

You see an hour ago I received the following email

• That was sent approximately 10 hours after I noticed Google had given the all clear and removed warnings from their search results
• Google had informed Stopbadware.org which is used by browsers, and there were no longer warning messages in Firefox and Chrome (I didn’t check IE)

The notification suggests that links have been removed from the Twitter system and they have removed a link from my profile

Here is the link within the profile editor

Any attempt to edit the link results in a warning at the top of the page

I can understand that Twitter is a big site, and it might take a long time to process malware notifications, thus it might well have taken them 36 hours from when Google notified Stopbadware to get to the stage of realising that there might be a malware problem.

But knowing they were processing 36 hour old data, wouldn’t it be sensible, in fact downright prudent to double-check with a fresh import of data from Stopbadware, just in case during the interim 36 hours the situation had been rectified.

Instead they clobber my profile links, and possibly others as I haven’t tried posting a direct link to this domain yet from Twitter, but I wouldn’t put it past them preventing links that haven’t been pre-shortened from now being posted.

It is good that Twitter is doing something to protect their users, but this is like putting on a condom the morning after.

Update: 24 Hours Later

It is now 24 hours since Twitter notified me that they were removing links to http://andybeard.eu, and about 34 hours after I noticed my site had the all clear from Google and Stopbadware.

It is clear that someone from Twitter is aware of the problem, as there has been a manual fix to my profile link, but it still isn’t possible for someone to create a direct link to my site from Twitter without it being rejected as malware.

As an example, I just tried the following tweet “Twitter still thinks http://andybeard.eu has malware”

The result is a warning notice

Oops! Your Tweet Contained A URL To A Known Malware Site

I should point out that Google and Stopbadware were a lot less accusatory in their wording, suggesting possible causes. There is a difference between a site specifically hosting malware and a site that has been hacked and had iframes inserted.

Update: 98 Hours Later

It is now 98 hours since Twitter notified me that they were removing links to http://andybeard.eu, and about 108 hours after I noticed my site had the all clear from Google and Stopbadware.

Obviously I feel Twitter need to fix something that is incredibly broken

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The Twitter Method

They have a ton of training on how everything works, along with guides on how to out-source it.

I was given access to the membership site which is part of what is on offer, and it is very well put together including a funky navigation system & video player.

I haven’t had a chance to go through lots of the material, but this comes with serious pedigree.

From what I have seen, this isn’t information you can find in 100s of blog posts already, and is an opportunity that even suits those with very little time or experience.
I hope people don’t abuse it as it could be abused.

No affiliate link (I am sure I owe Jack some traffic) though I think many will find this useful.

p.s. for the Google engineers reading – I received access to a site for a review as an affiliate, and decided not to make any money promoting it as it is 3am, Jack is a mate, and I would have to navigate the YAIAI (Yet another Infusionsoft Affiliate Interface) – I am just sick to death with Infusionsoft today.

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Allow Twitter to Scrape Your Personal Information In Gmail

I have written extensively about the problems associated with Viral Tell-A-Friend systems. People are becoming careless with personal and business security, and soon adding an email and password to a box will be as common as handing over an email address… but with dire consequences.

My opinion, Techcrunch shouldn’t publish what they found in Twitter’s undie drawer… but only with the provision that they remove the hypocritical viral tell-a-friend, and encourage other startups to do the same… until they learn to use APIs correctly.

Dopplr manage  to use APIs for TAF without the massive funding, and Gigya seem to have some API support.

Let something good come of this, and get all major social sites to stop scraping 3rd party accounts as well.

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As an affiliate, and future product publisher, proof (that is unequivocal)  is something in which I place a great amount of emphasis.

• It allows me to recommend a product or service with reduced risk of damaging my own reputation
• I want to be sure my readers will be delivered the product or service promised, thus giving them the potential to achieve any results claimed
• Reputation is important – often proof also acts as a significant guarantee that customers will be treated well (within the boundaries of what the product or service encompasses)
• Reliable data – if I can dig holes in claims made in promotional material, so can my readers
• Real testimonials – you can pay huge fines for astroturfing
• Proof in advance during product launches by providing real substantial results in advance is a powerful concept.
• Proof increases conversions

Lets look at a few good and bad examples

Formula 5 From Stompernet

I was travelling in the UK when this launched first time around at the start of the year, and actually picked up a big heavy box from my UK address by hand rather than having it forwarded.

Stompernet have in recent times made a massive move in providing their army of affiliates with review samples in advance of a launch – not necessarily a “final” version, with all the bonuses and long-term subscription, but certainly enough for an affiliate to review a product with significant authority.

Now Formula Five is being relaunched, they went through a similar launch process, with the added benefit of genuine customer testimonials.

Following the same formula as the initial launch, providing free training that is intended to create “results in advance” – prospects take action based upon the free training, and see the benefit to their business before the product is even on sale. In many ways more effective than free samples or $1 offers for a higher ticket product.

Formula Five MBA In A Box

Case studies where students by increasing perceived value, and enhancing their product offering (additional cost 3%), increased revenue by 35% and profits by a staggering 68% – same number of sales

Increased Profit by 68%

A sales page packed with case studies and genuine testimonials

Formula Five Business Training

And of course some fast mover bonuses and strong guarantee

Be warned – whilst Paul’s teaching is extraordinary, this is business training – just like at school you really will need to take frequent breaks, and possibly “rewind” the video repeatedly until some strategies really sink in.
When Paul suggests you take action when you think something could be implemented in your business, do it, your business (and family) need you to take action based upon Paul’s teaching.

Howie Schwartz – IM Remarkable

I wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of promoting Howie’s IM Remarkable unless I felt the training he was providing before asking prospects to get out their credit card was going to be exceptional.

He had more than 100 people take part in his pre-launch competition, and 1000s of people joining leaving comments on the pre-launch blog and training blog.

It also added a little variety to coverage. Howie’s SEO strategies in many ways are different to what I have experience with, and of the people I know working using those techniques, he is right up near the top of the earnings scale.

The Ugly Proof

AWStats / Webalizer

Stats based upon server logs have immense value, but they need significantly intelligent filters to weed out all the bots.

Here are some old stats from this blog (at least I think they are)

Awstats

Wow, over a million “hits” per month and look at those page views!

It is meaningless rubbish, when some bots hit you 72 times per day

It gets even more ridiculous if you host your RSS feed on your own server, though all it takes if you have a long RSS feed is a small update to mean 10s or even hundreds of media files get accessed… but possibly just the headers to see if they have changed… but that still gets counted.

Earnings Checks

No earnings shot… but just think of these factors that are rarely mentioned on sales letters.

• Traffic cost – Adwords etc
• Outsourcing costs
• Tools / Software / training costs
• JV / Affiliate cut, for many products up to 75%
• Travel (for the JV deals)
• Partners – many products are the combined efforts of a number of marketers

Earnings might still be significant, but with the FTC crawling over every form of word of mouth marketing these days, and various forms of false advertising, both product owners and affiliates have to be especially careful.

The funny thing is, from an accounting perspective paying an affiliate 75% through Clickbank is in many ways “free traffic”, as long as you don’t claim gross income as yours.

Network Effects Tactics & Automation

Lets look at claims often made by people promoting social media and Twitter products

I am not going to single anyone out specifically, but one current promotion does come to mind. This doesn’t mean anyone is being dishonest, or reflect the quality of the product which I haven’t seen, but in many ways the data seems from my slightly more critical eye to be looked at through “rose coloured glasses”.

We will take the following as fact

• Huge twitter following
• Significant email list
• Decent earnings per “twitter follower”

However we have to look at correlation, causation and add in a lot of other factors

• Partner with a list
• Created a number of products, including social media / Twitter training
• All products have been promoted by affiliates

Plus 5 tactics

• Autofollow people who follow you
• Proactive following up to your limit daily
• Unfollowing people who don’t reciprocate within set period of time
• Automation
• Lots of tweets

Lets look at how some of those factors might influence Twitter follow size

People with huge responsive lists that promote Twitter to their lists, used autofollow, and have promoted twitter on blogs and landing pages.

Rich Schefren 22793 followers 462 Tweets (only started autofollowing later on)

John Reese 24840 followers 3450 Tweets (recently stopped autofollow and cleaned list)

Andy Jenkins 12388 followers 1433 Tweets (Only started autofollow later)

Mike Filsaime 34055 followers 908 Tweets (recently stopped autofollow and cleaned list)

So being a huge list owner doesn’t get you to 100K+ twitter followers

So how about being a reasonable sized list owner, who is super helpful but doesn’t autofollow?

Lets grab a few Copywriters

Michel Fortin 6735 followers 5059 tweets

Marlon Sanders 4308 followers 3581 Tweets

Brian Clark 27933 followers 5110 Tweets

Ray Edwards 6630 followers 2044 tweets

Brian from memory was an early adopter, and is probably better known among tech and “blogging” bloggers.

None of these guys autofollow

To compare, Darren from Problogger has a very similar audience to Brian, and also has a blog on Twitter tips.

Darren Rowse 72477 followers 13185 tweets (I believe Darren autofollowed for a while)

Someone not afraid to use “tactics” in social media

Reg Saddler 93795 followers 20353 tweets

Reg certainly autofollows, possibly also used other tactics in the past

Robert Scoble 98371 followers 21817 tweets (proponent of autofollow)

I don’t think Robert uses other tactics, but he is know to be an early adopter, and his use of Twitter gained lots of coverage and links, plus his blog is popular.

Other Social Media Mavens (those who don’t grace the Twitter “blogroll”)

Coach Deb 19874 followers 18617 tweets (doesn’t autofollow)

Mari Smith 44456 followers 25273 followers (autofollows afaik)

Alternatively you could just be a bot tweeting links to Delicious popular items and have 50K followers with some smart automation or outsourcing.

The idea that you can just be a cool dude, behave like you are at a party, and gain a huge number of followers just doesn’t correlate – the highest correlation is autofollow combined with other tactics and automation.

Personality, engagement and useful content would however play a factor in monetization – maybe a good idea to use that in your email marketing.

It should be noted that Twitter has been cracking down on autofollow and various gaming tactics involving following/unfollowing. Most of the people employing such tactics in the past have slowed down to gains of just 500 followers per day, and those are not targeted.

I also want to highlight this post from John Reese
5 Reasons Why Twitter Auto-Follow Is Bad Marketing

Thus to achieve the results claimed by “Twitter” marketers:-

• Huge twitter following = automation + tactics
• Significant email list = major problems with correlation
• Decent earnings per “twitter follower” = major problems with correlation

I am not saying that building a relationship with a list or Twitter following isn’t important, and it would certainly help with monetization, but to attribute that with huge twitter followings would be naiive, or atypical – I look on @Garyvee as atypical, and from memory (before he was added to the “blogroll” on Twitter) he wasn’t touting 6 figure Twitter followers.
I don’t know anyone who engages their audience more on Twitter.

The biggest correlation on sales as an affiliate?

1. Released a product heavily promoted by JVs to build a massive list of fresh leads who trust you (even if they didn’t buy)
   
2. Offer the leads who didn’t buy that product, the product as a bonus, or something of equal or greater value in an affiliate promotion. Fresh leads and $5000 worth (real worth) of bonuses sure does have a MASSIVE effect on conversion rate.

It is nothing to do with Twitter follower count…

If I made extraordinary claims as an SEO about a certain ranking factor without evidence that I had carefully isolated as many outside factors as possible, and created a test that could be repeated, I would likely be ripped apart by my audience.

As a marketer, assume every claim you make will be put under the microscope by your customers and peers – ideally they should find more proof that supports you, not less.

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Something else to avoid is any mention that you might benefit financially from just an opt-in – the problem there is disclosure, and as more and more launches include a pre-launch opt-in competition with prizes, especially in the internet marketing niche, affiliate program managers are going to specifically have to allow, and encourage disclosure.

Bonus Delivery Hurdles to Overcome

• You are rarely notified about an opt-in – there is a feature in Infusionsoft to allow notifications of opt-in, but most affiliate program managers switch this notification off. Even if you have selected it as on, there doesn’t seem to be a way to control it within the Infusionsoft affiliate interface, and preferably send the email to a different email address than other notifications and mailings.
• Forget about manual processing – as your business scales, manual processing of an opt-in to give a bonus just isn’t possible.
• Circumvention - if you are offering something of value, you don’t want it to be delivered on a directly accessible thank-you page that is indexed, or could be passed on
• Excessive friction – you want if at all possible to avoid adding any process that could go wrong, cause support questions, frustration, etc.
• Lock-in – Preferably if you do this, you want to do it with a marketer who in some ways offers a lock-in of leads that are sent – currently you can’t do anything for back-end promotions of 3rd party products effectively (well unless it is Clickbank), but at least you want them to use that email address for it’s primary intention… to sell your lead their products, so you make money.

Benefits Of Bonus Delivery

Higher opt-in rates – if you can give something of suitable vale, preferably complementary, there is a good chance your readers might opt-in to someone else’s list to get it.

Complementary – what you offer could be complementary to their launch materials, improving the sales process, magnifying “results in advance” and giving you a reason why you are mailing… you really do care about the success of your readers, don’t you?

Tracking & Automation – for slightly more advanced users, if you can get someone to take action, even if it is signing up to a list belonging to an affiliate partner, that is valuable information that can be processed using the automation rules of various autoresponders – business intelligence allows you to segment your lists more accurately, better determine offer choice, or can even steer product development.

Can be turned into a JV bonanza – with smart rebranding or cross-marketing of bonus products, you could potentially gain additional subscribers, covert others to make promotion materials on your behalf, and make more money from multiple streams of income.

Live Example

Over the last week or so, I put together a demonstration system that took relatively little coding and provides me with simple interfaces to automate bonus delivery.

At the same time Howie Schwartz was in the middle of a launch and I knew I could create a fantastic bonus that would complement his launch, so I have been burning the midnight oil.

IM Remarkable Bonus

Some Key Features

• The report isn’t your normal affiliate freebie – it is 50 pages, and was a significant time investment.
• The system isn’t dumb – you are required to submit the correct key
• The whole system can be rebranded – a JV partner could send traffic to my site, and gain 100% referrals to Howie – great excuse to send an additional email, plus help people more.
• The Twitter “tweet” links later in the process are rebranded as well so any viral effect, JV partners can gain a benefit.
• It would take me about 2 minutes to add additional unadvertised bonuses to the backend
• I haven’t asked/forced an opt-in – I didn’t want to add a negative element for JVs
• I didn’t ask for a password to retweet about the site

It is simplistic, there are still some holes, but it is something that anyone could set up.

Take a look at http://nicheexposed.com & http://bonusitem.com

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