Like many of you, when all the tools came out to help online marketers build a huge Twitter following that you could promote to, I decided to check out. Not only did I shell out money to sign up for programs that would get me followers but I invested in a few softwares to help advertise the products I was selling. By the time I’d finished, I’d paid for something like eight programs to do some of the grunt work involved in Twitter marketing.

One of these programs was an automatic ‘people follower’ on Twitter with the aim that some of those people would follow me back. If anyone was not following me, I had another program that would automatically take them off my to-follow list. Deleting non-followers meant I could devote my attention on those who might be swayed to follow me. A few of the tools I purchased are not interesting enough to talk about but I will just mention a useful program that auto-Tweeted any blog posts I made whenever they were published. Initially, I was truly pleased with the end results after using the programs in combination since they actually delivered on what they promised. Nonetheless, my exhilaration was quickly crushed when I realized that I wasn’t generating any money. Every day I would post approximately ten blog entries knowing that they would then automatically be shown on Twitter as well. Assuming that more posts 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.

Now allow me to tell you all about my results. In three years, I was able to build a Twitter following of moreo r less ten thousand users. And though you may think that is terrific, wait ’til you hear the whole story. During those three years I had affiliate links to my products on no less than fifteen thousand posts in my Twitter account. My blog posts showing on Twitter was the only form of advertising for that blog I did and to find out the effectiveness of Twitter I did not even ping new posts as they were published. Exactly how ‘good’ it was rapidly became evident: after 3 years just two affiliate sales generated $46.74 plus a whopping $9.10 for Adsense. With just 2 – 4 visits every day originating from Twitter, perhaps this is not surprising.

Even with nearly 10,000 Twitter followers and using software automation, it seems that this is not adequate to make money marketing with Twitter. The bottom line is that the money I’ve generated is not adequate to cover the cost of the Twitter programs I purchased to start with. There may be other better ways of marketing on Twitter, but from my experience, using automatic software tools is not one of them.