Online marketing with Twitter

I want to describe my first 18 days on Twitter. I have reached 2667 followers and sent 1043 tweets. I have got new friends, also on facebook where some fellow Twitters also have accounts. I am quite happy with that. But so far my earnings are a big fat ZERO! So from an online business point of view my twitter start is a failure, at least so far.

I am an IT guy, with long experience as an entrepreneur, business owner and consultant, operating in huge complex real-time systems. Lately I have started to look closer at internet as a tool for marketing and a vehicle for online business, thus taking advantage of my solid knowledge of internet form "behind the curtains".

I was working on a different project, construction of audio/video downloads, when I was introduced to Twitter. I signed-up and started to look around. I was overwhelmed by the number of marketing systems and business systems that was offered. I quickly decided to explore my own path and ignore all such offers.

So how to design my own path? I have tried article marketing for a limited time before, and I do like writing so thgat was one obvious ingredient. And I realized that the tweets are very limited as information bearers simply because they are short. I decided to use my blog for additional and extended information. I also signed up for two affiliate programs I considered OK to promote. I also signed-up for a tweetspinner account to send tweets automatically and after some time I added a tweetlater account for automated direct messages to new followers and automated follow-back. Finally I added a ViralURL account to get easy tracking of my links, and also cloaking of them. That was it!

I set my autotweets to trigger every half hour. I need to do that at least twice daily. I usually login occasionally during the day, to issue manual tweets; either non-commercial social tweets, questions or remarks about online business or tweets to promote my affiliate programs. I spend some time writing articles. I write two articles per week, and spend some hours on each article.

I have found that it is very tempting to log in to twitter to check the number of followers and to login to ViralURL to check the link hit statistics. Running an online business requires a lot of self discipline since no boss is there to tell me what to do and what not to do!

I have collected hit statistics for my links only the last few days, but anyway here are the numbers:
I got 278 visits to my blog
I got 177 visits to my first affiliate program
I got 233 visits to my second affiliate program
I got 163 visits to my article collection at Ezine

Not too bad! But, and it is a BIG BUT! So far not one single dollar in income! ZERO on my bank account! I had honestly expected more than that, at least one or two sales per 100 visits to affiliate sites. Am I too impatient or is twitter a low-performing online market site?