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James C. Tanner |
Copyright 2010 James C. Tanner. All rights reserved. |
2010 ARTICLES |
Automating Your Twitter Experience For Faster Profits! |
"TheTweetTank" Tanks Out! |
By James C. Tanner One secret to making money online is to find a system that makes a little money consistently, then duplicate it over and over again. In today's computer generation, to accomplish this feat, we often rely on one of two things,lots of hard long hours, or find a way to automate our system. In the past decade, email marketing was the fad. With this marketing concept came a new demand for filters, and anti-spam software. Venturing into the next generation of Internet users, it's believed that the era of email marketing has now gone the way of the dinosaur. Some people simply haven't realized it yet. With browsers now building in SPAM detection systems, it's getting harder and harder to create a mailing list large enough to deliver a substantial online income. In 2006, along came a little gimmick called TWITTER. TWITTER is a free social networking and microblogging service that enables users to send and receive messages no larger than 160 characters known as TWEETS. Since it's creation in 2006, TWITTER has grown with lightening speed, and has become a reckoning force in the social media world. By the end of 2009, some 24,000,000 users have tapped into TWITTER. For entrepreneurs and businesses, TWITTER has become the new frontier of marketing. Imagine being able to put a small 160 character sales pitch infront of thousands of people at the click of a button. Consider the following scenario. Pretend we have 1000 followers on our TWITTER account. By placing one little 160 character sales pitch onto our network, a business or entrepreneur can reach out and touch 1000 potential customers with a single click of a button. Online marketing knows that a person has to see a pitch on average nine times before they'll take action. That means you'd have to send your pitch 9 times over the course of the day, for a total of 9000 individual sales contacts. Not everyone is on TWITTER at the same time, so in sending out your message nine times, you may only reach 25 to 30 percent of your followers, a couple of times each day. Along comes a process known as automation--the ability to pre-program TWEETS and establish a schedule whereby they could be broadcast on your behalf. Let's say we have a 1000 followers, and we now automate 24 TWEETS to occur once and hour around the clock, and continue to do it for 30 days or longer. That's 24,000 individual sales contacts each and every day. Let's say over time, you establish 30,000 followers. My math might be a little rusty, but off the top of my head that works out to about 720,000 individual sales contacts in a 24 hour period. This is the dynamic created by tools designed to automate your TWITTER experience. In my own quest to research various TWITTER capable automation tools, I decided to try out a product known as "THETWEETTANK". Right off the bat, the front page of the website boasts the potential of making up to $500.00 a day on TWITTER. A comment I would classify as a bit wishful. In the 60 day period that I've used this tool it has only generated on one day, a sale of $22.60. While the web site graphics are really cheap and cheesy looking, one must delve into this product more closely. The video series which shows you how to put the product to work are tacky, lacking professionalism in their creation. In all honesty, between the cheesy web site graphics, and the low quality videos, I could easily understand how the owners of this product would turn away more potential customers than draw them in. In concept, this product is a really good conceptual design which desperately needs some- one who has the skill set to take it to the next level. In the 8 weeks I've used this product, THETWEETTANK has experienced technical problems galore. Dealing with their customer service rep was at times as tacky and cheap as the look of the site. The truth of the matter is, I haven't seen this product produce the sales it states a person can potentially attain. During the video presentation there is a reference to building a group of followers in the range of 30,000 within one to two months. Using this system, the best I've been able to accomplish, (testing it on several twitter accounts) is 1400 followers and slowly growing. |
It wouldn't be right to create the impression that everything about this tool is bad. Certainly that is not the case. Running several sets of statistics while using this software I began to notice some changes in the number of clicks on the links I provided in my TWEETS. |
Over a 30 day period, the number of clicks on my links began to skyrocket. Using Clickbank products as part of my test, I found that while only one sale resulted as a result of this automation software, something else occurred--my Google Adsense revenue began to soar. While some of my TWEETS pointed towards Clickbank products, other links pointed towards my various web pages which already had built into them a monetizing platform through the use of Google Adsense. As I was looking to see this product produce income from one direction, I was caught off guard by a stream of revenue which occurred unintentionally as a result of using THETWEETTANK. In today's world, income is income, no matter how much or where it comes from. Would I recommend THETWEETTANK to people? With a heavy wince on my face, I would have to say very slowly, "Kind of!" This software is often very slow and clumsy. There are script errors which occur frequently, and the clock which is built into the software never seems to work properly when a member sets their accounts. I continually find my accounts are running two to three hours out of whack with the way I've set them up in THETWEETTANK back office. If you look at this product with the intention of making a fast buck, go elsewhere. Until I see this product deliver $500.00 a day in revenue, I'm inclined to say the website's claim to this level of potential income is more hype than reality. The adsense revenue this has created for myself has more than covered the purchase price of the software in the first 30 days, but not much more than that. In the second 30 days, my adsense income is growing. As for website traffic, I have never seen a product deliver traffic to my site as well as THETWEETTANK has. If you have an ecommerce site, or a marketing landing page which converts at a high level, then swinging over to TWITTER with a product like THETWEETTANK can't help but boost your traffic to your site. The resulting sales would depend on how well your landing page has been crafted. In using this product with landing pages, THETWEETTANK can deliver traffic into the top of your sales funnel. The draw back is putting up with all the tacky graphics, and High School level programming glitches in the software itself. Thinking ahead, it must be stated, TWITTER is not too warm and fuzzy on the idea of automated TWEETS. If the owners of THETWEETTANK do not pull their act together now and clean up their software glitches, then I could easily see TWITTER coming along and throwing a screen, or filter at them which could effectively block THETWEETTANK without any notice. Like any business trend, one has to ride the wave while the wave exists, and right now, although in a very frustrating manner, THETWEETTANK does deliver traffic. As for a fair price for this product--I do not believe that in it's current form this product is worth the $70.00 to $80.00 price range it hopes to attain, but a price range in the $30.00 to $40.00 range would be a fair value for the consumer. Will I continue to use this product? The answer in short is...FOR NOW! If someone builds a better "mousetrap" then I'd sure welcome it, as there is definitely room for improvement in this product. For now, I certainly have the competition on stand by as a back up plan. -- James C. Tanner is a highly published writer and speaker. |
(This figure shows the traffic increase experienced during Weeks 4,5,6,and 7 of our product test. At the start of this test, traffic on these accounts was zero.) |