Using Twitter to Boost TypePad Affiliate Commission

Twitter is a great way to get the word out about your blog and increase traffic. It can also be useful for boosting affiliate revenue if you are part of the TypePad affiliate program. Here are some tips and tricks to keep in mind on Twitter best practice.

Marketing Best Practices

• Calls to action: Include strong directions in your tweets to encourage people to click through.
• Don’t Spam:  If you over do it, it will take away from your promotions.  Spamming will reduce the effectiveness of all your marketing, and make followers less likely to pay attention to your posts. Make sure to only tweet with new news or at least a new slant.
• Limited Time Offers:  Many of our promotions are limited time offers. By highlighting expiration dates, you can encourage potential customers to sign up soon.
• Tell People Why You Love TypePad: Don’t just tweet about why people should buy a blog, tweet about why you like TypePad blogs.  By telling personal experiences you have had with TypePad, readers will be able to relate to what makes TypePad so great!

Interacting with Followers

• Include Initial Tweet in your response:  If you are responding to a comment about your tweet, make sure to include the initial tweet in your response.  This keeps the original idea in focus.
• Direct Messaging: Do you have a lot of followers?  If so, try direct messaging them.  If you see one of them has a post related to launching a blog, message them and suggest they use TypePad.  Watch out for people tweeting about blogging and respond with offers.
• Shorten message length:  Keep below 125 characters, so you can be retweeted.  Lowering the characters will allow room for spaces and usernames.

Timing

• Retweet:  Tweets can get lost in the page.  If you tweeted about something on a Friday night, it is likely that it may get lost by Monday.  You can retweet an idea to make sure followers see your tweets.  Just make sure to reword your tweet, so it doesn't get too repetitive.
• Time of Tweets:  Think about what time your followers are likely to be on Twitter. Optimize views by timing tweets to when you expect a lot of users to be online.  For example, if you are tweeting to followers who are likely to be checking while at work, it is probably not a good idea to post a lot of tweets on a Friday night.  Instead, try tweeting around 10 am PST so you can capture people getting to work on the west coast and coming back from lunch on the east coast.

URLS and Landing Pages

• Landing Pages: Think about where you are landing visitors once they click through a URL.  Land visitors on a relevant page with content about TypePad.   There should be Commission Junction (CJ) banners or links that are easy for them to access.  Better yet, include a shortened CJ link in your tweet.
• Shorten URLs:  Shortening a URL will allow you to utilize characters in your tweets.  People are also more likely to click on a URL when it is short and clean.  When URLs look long and messy, people may suspect them of containing viruses and are less likely to click on them.
• URL Tracking:  Track data about URL clicks.  Bit.ly will shorten your URLs and track data about how many clicks you have had.  Bit.ly is great because it is also free and built into TypePad when you share your posts to Twitter Have a go on your next tweet.

Example Tweets: Here are some ideas!

• Loving TypePad. It gives me complete control of design. Curious? I have a discount code [include bit.ly link to your site or the code itself]

Any other pearls of wisdom on Twitter? We'd love you to share them in the comments.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

Promoting a service, or even thinking about promoting a service,
whose departments which do not require one to be a Pro member in order to submit a query and yet fail to respond to mails sent to them can prove to be a daunting task, if not an impossible one.

Let's hope that those who are actually doing this have solid reasons for saying all that they say in order to convince people to switch from other services.

[Kofla Olivieri]

I barely use Twitter, usually to link my latest blog posts.

[Abigail English FYFI-For Your Fashion Information]

Great way to Blog....user friendly....AE

[Anastasia]

Just like Kofla, I only use Twitter to link my TypePad blog posts.

[Account Deleted]

I've been using Twitter for the past three years. I use it everyday. I'm already familiar with all of the tips you've provided in this post (it's good for beginner tweeters!).

This is a bit tangental, but... Would it be possible to set custom text to appear before or after a TypePad post linked automatically on Twitter? For example, I'd like to be able to include the phrase "New blog post:" before each of my tweets using the TypePad share to Twitter option. Why? Because tweets using that phrase are amongst the most clicked-on links on Twitter (I think I read this on Mashable or maybe in The Twitter Book). Another use for this feature would be to include hash tags in any post you had automatically tweeting your posts through TypePad. Integrating my blog's feed with Feedburner already allows me to do this, but it would be nice to have this feature native to TypePad, so I could check the Bit.ly stats in my Dashboard, rather than having to go to my Feedburner dashboard to check them.

Anyway, that's just a feature suggestion. :-)

[Mie]

Hi Brinstar,

That is a great idea. Unfortunately, this is not yet an option, but we've noted this to the product team.

Thanks for suggesting it!

[Manuel Molina]

it would be nice to see Typepad finally including a retweetmeme widget, so that the retweet button is embeded in each post.