Twitter is a incredible application for affiliate marketers. It has the ability to widely connect you with targeted individuals for offers or to generate traffic to your sites.

There is a “catch 22″ with it though. How effective Twitter is related to how many followers you have, but to develop a Twitter presence can be difficult. If you’re too ’spammy’ with your offers, you’ll lose followers, and that is your audience.

Like the sites I build, I always feel that they need to offer something to the viewer. A benefit to the person is the reason why they’re coming back. Twitter is no different. You should engage and interact with your followers. Generate a community, while slipping in a offer or two. The draw to the follower is because they genuinely care what you have to say. Your Twitter account shouldn’t be just spammy offer list, with each ’status’ being a link to a service or product.

Create a Twitter account that focuses on a interest or niche of your and then try to develop a small following. Engage in the conversation. Grow the account and hopefully in a little bit of time you’ll be able to send some targeted followers to your site or offer.

Getting targeted followers is really the key. One way is to use search.twitter.com and search for conversations that your niche is about and begin following those users. The other is to go to hashtags.org and find similar hashtags related to your niche. I personally use a tool called Bird Feeder, which will search for tweets matching your search criteria (you can also search by hashtag as well). It’s absolutely fantastic, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to increase their follow count. I recently wrote a review about Bird Feeder.

Just like everything, Twitter takes time, energy and effort. All of these are key to creating a quality twitter profile. Good luck!

Related posts:

1. Twitter Followers
2. Racheting up Twitter follower count
3. Bird Feeder for Twitter Review