Tweet, tweet.

It’s been a while since I posted an update, and with good reason. I’ve been a little preoccupied with things going down outside the world of affiliate marketing – and I’ve also been away at a festival. Anybody go to Latitude? I reckon I’ve copped the Swine Flu, you know. Sniffling all over WordPress this morning.

Anyway, it was the first proper break I’d taken since I visited Amsterdam last year (now THAT was a break). One of the scariest things that dawned on me was simply how pivotal my own presence is to my business.

I know some guys have set up offices and started taking on employees to handle the day to day chores of affiliate marketing – not me. It’s a solo effort, with a helping hand from sub-continent article scrummagers.

But in a situation where I’m several fields and a thousand sheep away from the nearest Internet connection, it becomes a major concern to be running any significant PPC campaigns. Anybody got any tips for dealing with personal vacations? I’d be happy to hear them and it might just save my phone battery in future.

Before I left, I decided that I needed to keep some kind of income ticking over. And that brings me to the topic that I was going to talk about here: raping Twitter for cash.

Unless you’ve been living under a brick for the last few months, you’ve noticed that Twitter is going from strength to strength. The reality is that when an online trend emerges, affiliate marketers will jump the fuck over it until it’s milked so hard for cash that there’s no sense in running it anymore.

Twitter is a relatively untapped source for affiliate marketers. I say that in full knowledge that some guys are creaming enough profit to buy every reader of this blog a luxury yacht. But in terms of how saturated Google, Facebook and the usual suspects are – it’s new and fresh. That’s not going to last for long so if you want to get ahead of the pack, you’ve gotta be moving faster. Simple as that.

Twitter automation is rapidly becoming one of my favourite methods for promotion online. Not least because it’s free and relatively easy to slip through the net. I’m not going to write up a step by step guide of what you need to do because the quicker the entry level gets lowered, the quicker it becomes another Facebook.

Now while I have no doubt that peeps are making money with rebill offers on Twitter, the quickest way to see Twitter’s earning potential is to find a relevant email submit and start thinking demographics. An email submit is dirt easy to make tidy cash from if you’re targeting the right people, at the right time, with the right talk.

I thought I’d wait before posting this so that I didn’t blow anybody’s campaign out of the water – my own included. But take Michael Jackson for an example.

Following his death, you could find his name trending on the front page of Twitter for over 3 weeks. I was seeing hundreds of Tweets every MINUTE with his name or some variation in the text.

I put in requests on several affiliate networks for new offers with Michael Jackson’s name attached. Didn’t really matter what the offer was. As long as it had some kind of incentive for the average MJ fan (free collection, free t-shirt, whatever), I wanted to promote it.

This was one of my first experiments with Twitter. I opened a new account manually, threw up a few tweets, then dumped a link to my offer with something like this:

“lol i love Michael Jackson, #MJ rules! Just got his collection for free, check it out: [My dirty aff link]”

Guys, it helps when you’re creating these fake Twitter accounts to grow a pair of boobs and act like you’re 16 all over again. People respond to barbie doll whores getting freebies.

This was a tiny test to see whether anybody would click through. That single tweet generated 3 clicks to the offer and lo and behold: a conversion. Marketing on Twitter is free so we’re talking 100% profit here.

Now it’s all good to be able to sit at your desk and send out manual tweets for 8 hours while posing as a teenage girl. Personally, too much of that would detract from my larger goals. And it’d probably give me issues on a worrying level.

The second I saw the conversion, my intentions immediately switched to automating the living shit out of the process and scaling it up to leap on the Michael Jackson trend with tweets firing out left right and center.

To do this, you really need automation software.

You may have noticed the Tweet Adder banner at the top of the page. It’s not just a token gesture to fund my next pint of Stella. It’s a product that I genuinely recommend as a brilliant way of automating the entire process of marketing on Twitter.

If you can setup a whole bunch of accounts and start nailing your target markets with relevant email submits, you’re in the money.

I’m not going to discuss the potential of dating offers, work from home opportunities or anything else because you should be thinking that already.

As with any form of automation software, a measured approach works best. There are factors to consider when you get involved with marketing in this fashion, but it’s an option. An option that many guys are making a lot of money from at the moment. The learning curve is pretty much hinged on how quickly you can learn to scale – and how effectively you can avoid the ban.

Check out Tweet Adder to see if it gets the imagination frothing.