Please Sell Me Stuff On Twitter Before You Know Me. Or Not!

Time for a bit of a rant on people’s selling tactics on twitter.  If you’ve been on twitter for any length of time I’d lay odds that you’ve seen messages like these:

Thanks for the follow. Would you like to get 16,000 Followers in 90 days & Make Money doing it?

Oh is that a question?  Well the answer is yes I would like to get 16,000 followers in 90 days, but I would much prefer that you take the time to get to know me before you start trying to sell stuff to me.

There is a number of different themes along similar lines.

Hi, how are you, please visit my website to… (let me fill in the blanks for you, they will use different words, but effectively, it’s click on my ads, buy my products, opt-in to my email where I can promote stuff to you without building any real relationship with you first).

Look I have no problems with Internet Marketers, in fact I am a full time one myself, and while I try hard to deliver good information on twitter, and blogs, etc I do have the occasional link to a product where I may receive a commission.  Yes I do have products I and my brother and business partner Anthony have developed to help other Internet Marketers get web traffic and good rankings on google, but we do not “ram” these products down peoples throats (at least not without trying to get to know them first).

I think it’s important to help people out, so you will find a lot of my tweets are to articles I have written, videos I have created, blog posts, other peoples interesting content and more.  All designed to give some insight into my take on life in the web 2.0 and seo, web traffic, geeky world.

My point is really simple, let’s actually get to know each other (a bit even) before doing the old hard sell.  Give me some information of interest, or something I can use, and then if you do ask me to buy something, and it’s relevant to my wants and needs, they I might just buy from you.  And I might just be happy to do it.  And I might buy something again.

Contrast this with the “cold sell” technique where I am already feeling negative thoughts about you.  If you are someone doing this on twitter, I’d suggest that you at least give some thought to this.  Are you happy doing this?  More to the point is it a successful tactic for you?  Are you getting loads of people thanking you for your “help” or are you getting the reverse (upset people).

I genuinely would be interested in hearing from you.

I’d be really interested in knowing just how many people are making a good living selling the 16,000 twitter product.   Looking at the product on clickbank I can  see there are over 570 unique sellers of the products.  In other words at least 570 people have sold that product in the past.  I wonder how many of them have sold it with a cold sell message like I refer to above.  Maybe I am too “old school” for all this?

Maybe I am in the minority, maybe people are quite happy receiving an offer with the first communication from someone on twitter and go off and buy the product,  happy.

Let me know what you think when you get a moment please, are you happy to receive these offers, do you hate them with a passion, do you buy a heap of products like these, is this the longest sentence you have read in a while (sorry).

Please forward this blog post to anyone you wish to stimulate discussion on what I think is an important point about selling stuff on Twitter.   I’ve love for this to end up as a huge stimulating debate on the pros and cons of “cold selling” tactics on twitter.

Oh and just to be clear, I have no problems with the people who created the 16,000 twitter followers in 90 day products, that is just an example of a product I am seeing more of recently in my twitter direct messages.

Thanks for reading!  By the way if your interested I previously wrote about the 7 biggest mistakes internet marketers are making with twitter.  Please read if this takes your fancy.

Cheers

Tim