So a few weeks ago I created a Twitter account for a fictitious Tea Partier/hardline GOPer (this will only make sense to US ppl or those familiar w US politics). Through manual following/unfollowing I amassed about 2k followers - but these are ALL real people, none are bots, as I followed only friends of active political junkie types NOT selling anything. I did all this largely for personal reasons, I am a political junkie myself and wanted to sort of infiltrate that movement to understand their thinking, a sort of sociological experiment (I like to understand how crazy people think). Now that I'm done with the sociological part I'd like to earn some $ off this endeavor. Obvious ideas: 1. Amazon: Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, etc etc type books 2. CPA Buy Gold offers (like every other FoxNews commercial is for that) 3. Content locking some crap like NASCAR event streams However with these types of offers I'm afraid I will lose any standing and credibility super fast and people will just unfollow me. The account has about 100 tweets, which were all manual, and is on 32 lists (with alot of them real manual lists, not the crap Formulists auto lists), the account is super clean, not tried to sell anything, and again the ~2000 are all super targeted, ALL very Conservative, GOP/Tea Party types, ALL Christian (and most are SUPER anti-Muslim - this is actually the reason I don't feel bad about running BH on them, as alot of their tweets are filled with such hate for people who are not like them, it's astounding). So I leave it up to the collective wisdom of BHW to come up with creative monetization techniques for this account. In return I will provide reports in this thread on the methods I end up trying and am happy to answer any questions how I acquired followers, and if someone is interested in trying this method parallel with me, I will give you a list of Twitter handles whose friend lists are super targetted, that you can use to acquire followers and a list of things that people go crazy for and RT (example: "LETS MAKE SURE BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS A ONE TERM PRESIDENT!!" got like 22 retweets lol). BTW this method can also be used with an account targetting the Left, obviously with different causes/offers, there are plenty of OWS types who are just as crazy as Tea Party types.
2k followers isn't much so keep working on it. These types of users are probably not going to respond well to Twitter spam, so I would make sure you post plenty of legit links and content. You could take an RSS feed and feed it through a service or use a blog and a plug in to push content to Twitter. I think that your best bet with this type of users would be Amazon products. I wouldn't hammer the offers, but a few a day would probably be fine. Books (not just political, expand out to inspirational or histories that would appeal to the audience) would be what I would pursue.
Yep, they will not respond well to spam at all, I realize that. 2K doesn't sound like a lot, but most of the most influential, but regular people in this niche are 2-3K range (unless theyre a celebrity/famous blogger, etc), it would be suspicious, in my opinion for this account to have much more than that, since the account is that of a regular Joe Shmo. Good ideas on inspirational/history books, like Newt Gingrich and Bill O'Reilly history books would probably sell like hotcakes. What's best way to cloak affiliate links on Twitter? I haven't really done any Twitter BH yet.
I would shorten all the amazon links through bit.ly. In fact this kind of does the opposite of cloaking it. Bit.ly makes the link as amzn.to/whatever. To me this just increases the trust factor of someone clicking this link since they can see it's an Amazon link. I wouldn't worry about growing the account bigger. Once you've churned through the users you are working think of expanding to periphery organizations such as the NRA etc. In effect, you can become one of the big players in the arena.
