You’ve spent time and money building your affiliate marketing site, only to hear crickets when your site goes live. This is a frustrating reality for many new affiliate marketers, and one that can be difficult to face.

Such a reality, though, can be easily overcome by using the right traffic-driving tactics. These tactics, when used correctly, can bring high-quality traffic to your site, making all the effort you’ve put in worthwhile.

How to Get Started with Twitter

Head to Twitter and register for an account. Fill in all the details it asks for, such as name, email address, username and password.

Once you’re in, enter details to your about page. Do this to ensure your Twitter profile is accessible and easy to understand for other Twitter users, who might be interested in your affiliate website.

Your “about” section is also a good place to put keywords, as well as your affiliate site’s URL, because people can search for you according to what words your bio contains.

Don’t forget to add a profile image. Make sure this is relevant to your brand so it will easily identify back to your website when your Twitter followers go through to it.

When you have a profile set up, it’s time to get yourself out there. Following other people who tweet content relevant to your niche is a fantastic way to start drawing attention to your new Twitter profile, so make sure to find some.

If you are unsure on the best ways to do this, try g oing to Follower wonk to search for relevant Twitter users based on your niche or topic.

You simply type keywords from your niche into the search bar, select whether you want to look at profiles or bios, and click the “do it” button.

Followerwonk gives you a list of Twitter users related to your keyword. You can see and sort by how many tweets they’ve tweeted, how many people they are following, how many followers they have, how long they've been active on Twitter, and their social authority in the site.

While you do need to recruit army of followers, you also need to give them something to read, and that’s where your own tweets come in.

How to Tweet

So how is this Tweeting thing done? Posting a Tweet is very simple. You just click on the text box on the left side of your screen and enter your text.

Alternatively, you can click on the blue square with a white feather, located at the top of your screen on the navigation bar. That’s the “Compose New Tweet” button.

Once your text is entered, click the blue “tweet” button and it’s away!

On Twitter, placing the hash symbol before a word or phrase is using what’s called a “hashtag”. This enables people with an interest in your keyword to see your Tweet, whether they follow you or not. Hashtags don’t have to be at the beginning or end of your tweet, either. You can place them wherever the most relevant word naturally sits in your sentence.

This is how non-followers with relevant interests can find you, and just as importantly, how you can find them.

Be careful not to spam each tweet with too many of these hashtags. Using any more than two is excessive. Just focus on the most relevant words to ensure your tweets hit their mark.

Similarly to hashtags, you can place an ‘at’ symbol before writing someone's name in order to include them in your Tweet. This way people can click on the name and find that person. If you use this whenever relevant in your tweets, you should get some people doing the same when they have something relevant to you.

The great thing about this is it spreads your reach by enabling their followers to click their way to you through the Tweet. Most Twitter users incorporate links into their tweets all the time, and it’s a good chance for you to link back to your affiliate site or offer.

To add a link to a Tweet you can type or copy and paste it into the tweet itself, or into the “What’s Happening?” box.

Writing Better Tweets

Your Tweets are your voice here, so it’s critical to make them high quality. Why? The social media cycle. Great Tweets get more followers. More followers lead to a higher level of social media engagement. That engagement is what ultimately leads to traffic.

Tests show that better headlines are what snags attention in the gargantuan mass of tweets flying around daily. You can increase your conversion rate on a website or link by 73 percent by making sure that your headline is compelling.

Make your headings the answer to questions your target audience might have on the brain, such as:

Keep it relevant to your niche, and really try to get into the head of your audience to produce a headline that they would click through on.

The first thing is mastering the art of maximum impact in minimal space. You only have 140 characters. If you had 10 seconds to catch someone’s attention with a story about your day, you wouldn’t start at the toast you had for breakfast.

Sink your teeth into the most interesting bits of what you want to say. Whenever you write a Tweet, think: Does it have all the information, hashtags, and links that I need it to, nothing more and nothing less?” Keep it as snappy and interesting as you can, putting in only what you need to.

If an “at username” begins a sentence, only people who are following both of you will see the Tweet. If you want to ensure more people see it, put something before the @ symbol, or re-structure the sentence.

Shortening links is important when such a lack of writing space is available. Twitter has its own link shortening, but the best external link shortening site is bitly.

A study by Dan Zarella has the proof of how good Bitly link shortening is on a scale of ReTweetability.

Simply type, or copy-paste the link you want shortened into the box, and Bitly will do the rest for you. It gives you a link to copy and paste into your Tweet or “What’s Happening” box.

How to Get More Followers

So you’ve made your links to your Twitter page, affiliate site, or offers Re-Tweetable. Now you just need to give your followers a reason to want to pass your Tweet on.

While Tweeting is the language, followers are the population, and you want as many citizens loyal to you as possible.

Resist the temptation to go and buy Twitter followers. They will probably be fake or non-responsive accounts, and you could end up banned, which is the last thing you want for your brand.

Announce on your affiliate site that you have Twitter and that people should follow you for up-to-the-minute content.

That seesaw of “I follow you, you follow me” is really one of the best ways to generate a following.

Find those relevant people via their tweets and websites like Followerwonk. Be careful not to be overly zealous with this though, because if you follow more people than the amount of followers you have, you run the risk of losing authority. Be selective to become a more influential personality.

Target more influential personalities, and engage with them in addition to your following. Join in on their conversations. Try to have something helpful or interesting to add, or show appreciation if they have an interesting Tweet. Especially focus on selecting those with a large influence in your niche on Twitter.

To avoid slipping off the radar of your new-found followers, you need to post regular Tweets. Try to aim for at least 3 or 4 daily at first, to show your account is active. Affilotools’ social module allows you to schedule posts on Twitter, which can make regular Tweeting easy, without having to be on Twitter all day.

Why High-Quality Traffic Is Important for Your Affiliate Marketing Site

In the context of affiliate marketing, high-quality traffic is that which helps you to meet your goals. If it converts (turns into sales), then it’s quality. If it doesn’t convert, then you have some tweaking to do.

As you can imagine, then, bringing high-quality traffic to your site is much more important than driving non-targeted readers. This is because while traffic numbers may be lower, your conversion rates and overall sales will be higher.

In addition, high-quality traffic can do good things for your site’s search engine rankings. Targeted readers are more likely to share your site’s content, increasing backlinks to your website.

10 Simple Twitter Tactics That Will Get You More Traffic for your affiliate site Today

1. #getvisual

Stop thinking of Twitter as a text-only platform.

Twitter now features visual content more prominently by auto expanding the images in your tweets, so accompanying your content with an image is more important than ever.

Stunning visuals will go a long way to help your updates stand out amongst the other tweets in your followers’ text-dominated Twitter streams.

In fact, studies show that tweets with image links get two times the engagement rate of those without.

When creating a new tweet, you can upload a photo and attach it to your tweet by pressing the camera button on desktop or mobile. This will add a link to the photo, as well as a preview of your photo that will appear in Twitter’s timeline.

Images can be up to 3MB in size and must have the GIF, JPEG, or PNG format. The photo will be automatically scaled for display in your expanded Tweet and in your user gallery.

Choose photos with a strong focal point that draws the eyes of viewers to one particular point, like the image below.

To find quality images that are free (and copyright free), use Flickr copyright free images, Free Range Stock, Unsplash or browse through the free stock images iStock releases every week.

Alternatively, look to purchase a subscription to iStock, Shutterstock, Corbis, Thinkstock or one of the many other databases of stock images.

When tweeting a link to your latest blog post, use one of the images from the post to help drive more clicks on the shared link. The image should relate directly to the subject of your blog post, which should help incentivize people to click.

2. #teaseyourfollowers

When tweeting links, never give too much away about the content in the body of your tweet.

If a reader can guess the entire story simply from reading your tweet, why would they click your link to read more?

Frame your tweets to highlight both the benefit of the content and to generate curiosity. And speak plainly, eliminating the use of complicated words.

One way to tease your audience is to ask a question that begs for an answer.

Here’s an example from prominent blogger Kristi Hines, tweeting a question about Google Authorship that implies the answer can be found by following the link to read the post:

And don’t use all of your 140-character limit. According to research by Dan Zarrella, tweets that are between 120 and 130 characters receive the highest click through rates (CTRs).

Think of this as your sweet spot for writing engaging tweets – giving more room for other users to organically retweet your content also helps

3. #berepetitive

Posting the same update to a social channel several times is considered bad practice because it provides little additional value to your audience.

However, updates are easily missed on Twitter and your followers may be genuinely disappointed to miss out on your latest post.

To share the same content several times without annoying your audience, alter the images and text used in the tweet.

For instance, you might tweet a link three times, each time using different content:

Tweet it first with the original headline, a link and a photo from the post.
Tweet it next with a quote and a link to the article.
Tweet it one last time with a different photo, a link and a question that creates curiosity about the post’s subject.

These tweets should be posted at different times of day for maximum visibility. You can easily do so by using a Twitter scheduling tool like HootSuite or Buffer to schedule your tweets.

You can even tweet the same content on multiple days, but don’t promote the same content more than three to four times in a single week. And the promotional tweets should always be spread out among other tweets – otherwise you’ll sound like a broken record and irritate your followers.

Done right, this technique will get your tweets in front of many more of your followers than tweeting only once, all without you having to worry about spamming your audience.

Also share old content as long as it is still relevant to your audience weeks or months later. Reposition this “evergreen” content by sharing a tip, quote, statistic or other takeaway from the blog post that highlights the article in a new light. You don’t need to call this content out as old, just as long as it’s still valuable to your audience on Twitter.

4. #hijackyourbio

When you show up in someone else’s stream (or appear in the Who to follow side bar), the only thing they will see is your name, profile photo and possibly your tweet.

If they want to find out more about you, they’ll click on your Twitter profile. And one of the first things they will see is your bio because the eye is naturally drawn to the header photo at the top of your account.

Most people use their Twitter bio to list information about themselves and their occupation, and then in the website field, they include a link to their blog home page or website.

Instead, you can use the website field to link to your latest blog post or your most popular content.

You can even hijack your own bio to include a specific call to action with a shortlink to a blog landing page optimized for Twitter users.

Sure, this limits the amount of other content you can display in your bio, but acts as another channel for directing valuable traffic to your blog.

Be sure to update this information regularly so that your Twitter presence is always in step with the latest content on your blog.

5. #besubmissive

Your Twitter community can be quite helpful with informing the direction of your content.

So let them tell you exactly what to do.

Poll your Twitter audience by asking what type of issues they typically face. By showing interest in the challenges of others, you can create a circle of give and take that builds trust and familiarity among users with similar interests.

At times, you may have to incentivize your audience to give you feedback as Whole Foods did here:

When you have enough responses to identify any trends, create blog content answering those specific questions.

Once published, share this content on Twitter and be sure to @mention the users who had asked about those questions in the first place.

If you don’t have a large enough following on Twitter yet for a survey, that’s okay too. Twitter is still a helpful tool for conducting research on the topics people talk about most.

Use Twitter search to find references to the topics your blog covers and try to identify common questions and concerns. This will help ensure that your blog continues to provide content of true value to readers.

Either way, content tuned to the needs of your audience will attract more traffic to your blog.

6. #cheerthecompetition

Building relationships on Twitter is vital to your long-term success and, as mentioned earlier, who is in your community is particularly important.

Consistently tweet the content of the other influencers in your niche (even if they’re your competition), making sure to mention their handle and, of course, include a link to their article.

But create a balance between tweets that explicitly mention other users and tweets that don’t, like the New York Times section has done below with an article from the Daily Beast:

To take the interaction a step further, add your own comment to the tweet to incite a productive conversation with your own followers about the topic covered in the article.

Adopt the 80/20 rule – 80% of your tweets should highlight the content of others, and 20% your tweets should promote your own content.

Once your audience and fellow Twitter users in your extended network get used to you sharing valuable content sourced from your community, they are more likely to engage with your own content when you tweet it.

Start to communicate directly with Twitter power users both publicly with @mentions and then privately with direct messages (once they’ve followed you) to deepen the relationships.

These relationships will increase recognition of your tweets within your community, which will drive more traffic to the blog posts you’re sharing.

7. #lovehashtags

According to Expanded Ramblings, tweets with hashtags receive two times more engagement than those without. And the more engagement with your tweets, the more visibility they get and the more clicks your links receive.

Use hashtags related to the subjects of your blog posts so users searching for your expertise on Twitter can find your tweets.

Use the following methods to find suitable hashtags for your content:

Brainstorm possible hashtags for your posts, then find which are the most popular using the search function on Hashtags.org.
Pay attention to the hashtags influencers in your niche are already using for similar topics.
Find any relevant trending hashtags using WhatTheTrend – occasionally you may be able to tap into those too.

Be consistent by using the same set of hashtags over time to help better associate your audience with the subjects you tweet about and the topics your blog covers.

But don’t overdo it. Don’t use any more than three hashtags per tweet, otherwise you risk affecting the readability of your updates.

You can create your own hashtags too, but balance the use of original hashtags unique to your blog with more generic, trending hashtags.

For instance, if you blog about astronomy, you could include generic hashtags like #stars #explorer #thesky, as well as original hashtags like #tuesdaystargazing #katiesastrotips.

8. #behuman

People are what make a social network like Twitter successful. If you want to achieve a specific goal, like driving blog traffic, interact with people online how you’d communicate with them offline.

Share your personality, humor, likes and interests mixed in with your professional content. And share a variety of insights on what you know and love to help others learn more about you as a real person.

This might mean taking a funny angle on your industry to help make it both interesting and relevant, which will ultimately lead to more followers. Even if you tweet about a topic that has nothing to do with your blog, genuine passion will shine through and attract people to you.

Draw your audience into your interests and preferences by tweeting content you find valuable, informative or just enjoyable. If a Twitter user appreciates your unique personality, they’re more likely to trust your tweets and visit the relevant links you’re tweeting.

9. #stealshamelessly

While expressing your ideas on Twitter and establishing your own authority is important, stealing from others is sometimes okay too.

Find thought-provoking quotes to include in your tweets – people love sharing pithy sound bites.

Quotes from thought leaders, experts and well-known authorities will help associate you and your content with the recognized voices in your industry.

If your posts include interesting statistics and figures from other people, pull them out and include them in your tweets as bait to drive more traffic to your blog.

Bold and simple statistics stand out in a Twitter stream otherwise dominated by words.

People already doing this well on Twitter include Neil Patel, Dan Zarrella, Kristi Hines and Amanda Nelson.

10. #buyinfluence

Sometimes, particularly when you don’t have a large following, organic sharing of your content is not enough.

So consider paying to increase the visibility of your tweets by experimenting with Twitter’s promoted tweets product. Promoting your tweets allows you to target the right demographic by focusing on the keywords, interests, geography and devices that match your audience.

Most bloggers are on a budget, which is why you should select the tweets you promote carefully. These tweets could include links to your most popular evergreen content or in-depth content used to generate leads, original statistics on your industry, or simply the most compelling tweets that illustrate your unique take on the market.

Always ensure that the tweets you’re promoting will make sense to users who are not already familiar with you. Twitter users unfamiliar with your account shouldn’t need a strong context of who the tweets came from to understand your content.

For each campaign, split your budget 50/50 between users on mobile devices and desktop to see where your tweets gain the most traction. As your paid campaign continues, allocate more of your budget to where your tweets are most effective, and lessen your spend on the other targeting option.

It’s always a good approach to start simple and see what kind of results you achieve when experimenting with paid Twitter advertising before dedicating more time.

Are You Ready to Tweet Your Way to More Traffic?

You won’t become a traffic powerhouse on Twitter overnight, but if you follow these simple tactics, you can build your presence into a valuable source of new visitors and subscribers for your blog.

And although having the social media following of a billion dollar brand like Coca Cola would be great, getting results from a Twitter following you’ve built yourself from scratch is actually more rewarding.

To succeed as a blogger on Twitter, dedicate time to your community, express your interests consistently and promote your content sparingly.

Pick a handful of tactics to implement and set yourself some simple goals for your first month. Try to gain 100 new followers, have meaningful conversations with 30 more influential Twitter users in your network, and gain the first trickle of new traffic from your tweets.

Building a traffic-driving presence on Twitter is within the grasp of anyone who’s willing to put in hard work, be consistently generous and let their natural wit and personality shine through.

What are you waiting for? See you on Twitter!

How to Use Twitter for Affiliates: 10 Simple Tactics That Will Get You More Traffic Today