Online marketing is evolving at an astronomical pace and one of the major influences in this change is Twitter, if you have any type of retail business selling absolutely anything and you don’t use Twitter to get the message out there you are seriously missing a significant audience.  One of my websites is currently getting 7% of its traffic via twitter thats over 200 targeted visitors a day extra.

The most recent innovation by Twitter is Twitter Lists, and believe me Twitter Lists are awesome. Once people have added your twitter to a list your  tweets may potentially appear all over the internet. They will turn up on websites and blogs and there is a great likelihood that they will send you a lot of targeted traffic.

Oh and a little tip (for anyone who could be arsed to read this far down) Twitter Lists make an outstanding addition to your research armoury whether you are a merchant or an affiliate make lists of tweeters in niches you are interested in and bingo instant ideas.

For example I’ve just started a list of UK fashion merchants and fashion bloggers http://twitter.com/#/list/KeithBond/uk-fashion and I expect it to prove to be a useful resource of ideas and another way of getting through bloggers block.

For some time I have been pulling in the rss feeds from some of the very best UK affiliate marketing blogs and publishing them in an aggregated form on Internet Marketing Blogs, I set this site up simply for myself to use in January 2007 although I suspect one or two others do find it useful.

Last Saturday I decided to set up IMB with its own twitter @affiliateblogs, I mentioned it to my good friend Purple and he suggested automating the tweets by putting the rss feed through HootSuite, somewhat skeptical I took a look to see what was involved. It couldn’t have been easier to set up the account and plugin in the rss from IMB, maximum setting is 5 automated tweets / hour, so I put it on that, can always throttle it back if it seems too intusive or spammy.

Thats all there is to it, and so far it has gone pretty well, @affiliateblogs has picked up 300 followers in the week and at time of writing there have been 400 clicks through the twitter links.

The stats that Hootsuite provide are pretty good too here is the full week by click and location;

It also lets me know which blog articles have been most popular;

All in all a satisfactory first week, the jury is out whether I use similar automation on other projects but there is a fantastic potential, just hope Hootsuite keep an eye on their users to prevent it getting too spammy.