A few years ago, it was hard to ignore the buzz online about Twitter marketing tools. It was thought that Twitter was one of the best ways to grow a list and to get people to order the products you are advertising. But the question is, were any of those programs that were promoted, actually doing you any good? We are going to talk about Twitter marketing and whether or not it is worth your time and expense as part of your internet marketing tactic.

Anxious to step up my product sales, I went ahead and got started on Twitter marketing to create a huge list of followers hoping to turn them into purchasers. I signed up for programs that promised to get me followers on Twitter and paid for software tools to help publicize my products. In all, I think I bought about 8 software programs to help with my Twitter marketing venture.

One of these tools was an automatic 'people follower' on Twitter with the aim that some of those people would follow me back. Next there was the Twitter marketing tool that would un-follow those who were not following me. Deleting non-followers meant I could concentrate on those who might be swayed to follow me. Amongst other programs I purchased, there was one which automatically tweeted a blog post just as soon as it was posted to my blog. I must say that the combined effect of employing all these tools together produced superb results because each program did as advertised. Nevertheless, my excitement was quickly squashed when I realized that I wasn't making any money. My tactic was to post several blog entries each day and each of them was then sent straight to show on Twitter. Thinking that more blog entries would increase my blog traffic, I arranged for my daily blog posts to be made automatically both to my blog and to Twitter as well.

So let me reveal to you my results. Applying this strategy over three years led to nearly 10,000 people following me on Twitter. You may be extremely delighted to have that number of followers, but there's more to come. During those three years I had affiliate links to my products on at least fifteen thousand blog postings in my Twitter account. My blog posts appearing on Twitter was the only form of advertising for that blog I did and to determine the effectiveness of Twitter I did not even ping new posts as they were published. Well I found, in the last 3 years I generated 2 affiliate sales for a total of $48, and I pulled in $8.52 with Adsense. And that particular blog only receives about 2 to 4 visitors a day from Twitter.

In short, having approximately ten thousand followers on Twitter using all these Twitter marketing tools will not give you the results you desire. As a matter of fact, in the last 3 years I have not even generated good money from that blog to pay for the Twitter programs that I had purchased. There might be other better ways to promote on Twitter, but from my experience, using automatic software tools is not one of them.