An Affiliate Marketers Guide to Making Money With Twitter Ads

Twitter originally began almost as an afterthought. When it was first introduced to the virtual world, most people just saw it as a blip on the ever-changing World Wide Web. It was placed in the same categories as the slowly dying Myspace or any number of the other social media outlets, which regularly come and go at the mercy of a fickle public. However this time the public wasn’t quite so fickle. Twitter’s popularity and its market share in the social media industry has exploded over the past few years, leading to revenue of hundreds of millions of dollars and turning the platform into an affiliate marketer’s field of dreams.

Let’s examine just a few reasons why Twitter advertising is a great way for affiliate marketers to make money.

Drive Traffic

Twitter allows a marketer to connect directly into a hub of consumers who are ready to buy products and services that they are interested in. If you run a blog or a website, using Twitter could be a great way to drive traffic and to help build your reader base. From there you can then promote affiliate links either on social media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) to your followers, on your blog to your readers or through an email newsletter to your subscribers. Better yet, you could use all three. Any affiliate marketer should look to utilise as many effective channels as possible and Twitter is a great way of getting more people interested in your products and services whilst engaging them in a positive way.

The sheer reach provided by Twitter Ads means you are able to test a wide range of offers, and scale the profitable ones easily. Also, there is no minimum deposit with Twitter ads, so it is very easy to get started.

Affiliate-Friendly Offer Promotion

Twitter Ads allows it’s users to promote affiliate offers directly on the Twitter platform, although it is important to note that a balance should be found between promotion and adding value to continue to build your reach. However, for something like this to work, you really need to do your research with the offers you are promoting and you also need to really research the target customers and track the performance. Who is going to want to follow you on Twitter and why are they going to follow you? Why will they click the links you promote to them?

Note: looking for other affiliate-friendly traffic alternatives? Please read my post called: 9 Lesser-Known Google Adwords Alternatives That Don’t Hate Affiliates

Ad Targeting

The Twitter Ads advertise interface is very simple and intuitively allows marketers to promote their products to certain followers who fit a certain demographic based on their profile information and their user activity. This allows you to fine tune your offering to suit the perfect corner of the market and allows you to choose from the approximately 230 million people who use Twitter on a regular basis.

You can target your account and Tweets using a number of different factors including interests, location, gender, what device they’re using, what they’ve searched for using the Twitter search engine and also if they are similar to the people who are already following your account.

However, perhaps one of the important targeting factors is the keywords that appear in a certain user’s timeline. By targeting a user based on something that they have mentioned in a previous Tweet or mentioned in a previous Tweet that they interacted with (including retweets and favourites) you give yourself a better chance of delivering the right promotion to the right user at the right time and in the right context.

Using targeting properly is an extremely effective way to cut through the noise on Twitter and to help boost the response and sales you get from a paid promotion. As usual, although provide advertisers with powerful targeting options, each campaign should be tracked and split-tested on an ongoing basis.

Twitter Ads Tips & Tricks

Like any advertising network, on Twitter Ads some things are more effective than others. With that in mind, I have added a list of tips to consider:

• Ignore Twitter’s recommended bid price: start low and test performance
• Split-test using multiple tweets per campaign and track conversion performance
• Make sure your tweet contains a call-to-action with a value proposition. (e.g, ‘Download Free Voucher’ will work better than ‘Join Our Email List)
• Make sure that your ad copy has a ‘message match’ with your landing page. Keep your advertising message and benefits consistent through to conversion
• Try building a ‘buzz’ with your own non-generic hashtags and keep up the momentum with future tweets. This can work well with new products or offers.
• If you are targeting multiple countries/locations, split-test performance and bid/track on separate campaigns
• Ensure that your device targeting is consistent with the landing page, so if for example, the advertisers landing page renders poorly on mobile devices, stick to desktop targeting
• Start tightly (maybe user-targeting only initially) and then scale from there, widening the net as you go for larger volume.