Advertising affiliate marketing on twitter?

[David S.]

Okay, so I have the concept of advertising on twitter, which was the simple part, but how do you go about getting a decent user name?

Let's say I was advertising for Nike, I wouldn't just have a twitter account that said @nikerunning... That already exists... So how should I go about changing the name to something that works, selling what I'm selling, and not copying Nike?

(By the way, I'm not advertising Nike, just an example).

Anything helps!

[Andrew]

It really depends on what you are selling. Twitter is great place to market an existing big company. But I think starting from Facebook might give you more opportunities.

[Tori]

To be successful with affiliate marketing you need to provide interesting content. Using your example, let's say you are advertising for Nike. You need to create a website, blog or webpages that have useful and interesting information along with Nike products that relate to your topic. So perhaps it would be a product review of the newest Nike basketball shoe with your personal experience wearing it while playing basketball, of course with your affiliate link on the page to make it easy for someone reading your page to buy the shoe. Or a list of the top 10 Nike basketball shoes and the NBA players who wear them. Or the NFL teams or players that wear Nike football shoes. Or take it even further, by researching and writing an article about the punters in the NFL that wear Nike shoes and the similar model you can buy for yourself.

Then after creating an article you can twitter about the article like "Check out my review of the new Nike (model name) shoe" along with the link to the article. Maybe your twitter name would be something like NikeShoeReviews or NikeShoeGuru, etc. Even better yet, if you can, sign up for affiliate programs with athletic shoes from several companies, so you can compare them with each other, but have affiliate links to all so no matter what someone clicks on and buys you make a commission. Or you can go in another direction by just writing an article about how to choose a good but reasonably-priced basketball shoe for your 10 year old. Here's an article with an illustration of what I mean: http://www.squidoo.com/snow-shoe
Then maybe your twitter name could be athletic shoe guru. I really don't think your twitter account name is as important as your content. You can brand yourself or any twitter name by making good content that people want to share with their friends.

Just setting up a twitter account won't do much because if people go to your link and find nothing that interests them, they'll just click out and eventually will probably decide to unfollow you if you start to have a reputation of sending tweets to your affiliate links with nothing of interest.