Getting targeted traffic to a new or existing website is probably one of the most challenging hurdles to overcome in any Internet Marketing campaign.

Those who do manage to get decent volumes of traffic back to their websites are still faced with optimizing their landing pages for “conversions”, be they sales, comments on blog posts, Facebook “likes” or opt-ins, to name a few conversion scenarios.

A recent case-study I put together using a few test campaigns that drove highly targeted traffic from Twitter to a few ClickBank sales pages for products I randomly selected from a few different niche markets like Health, Gambling, Make Money Online etc., revealed some very interesting insights into the power of Twitter in Internet Marketing for generating traffic to a website. This traffic, though it was highly targeted, did not convert to sales AT ALL (which makes PERFECT sense and in no way suggests that the quality of the traffic was bad – the CTR was well over 93%)

Read on to find out how according to my tests, Twitter proved to be an absolute monster for generating traffic and how you need to optimize your landing pages to actually make this traffic “convert”.

If you’ve used Twitter for anything in Internet Marketing, you’ll know that a “tweet” containing your message and links can only be a maximum of 140 characters long.

If you look at this from an Email Marketing perspective, a “tweet” serves as a “Subject Line” in many ways, making your prospects “open the email” in the case of an email to your list, and “clicking the link in your short message” in the case of a tweet posted on Twitter.

BOTH need to be crafted intelligently so as to maximize “Open Rates” in email marketing or “Click-Through Rates (CTR)” in Twitter based Internet Marketing.

Once the reader clicks on the link in your tweet and is redirected to your landing page, the “conversion” challenge really begins 😉 Traffic is useless if you can’t make it convert to fulfill some goal or the other, e.g. a sale or opt-in in most cases. Traffic driven from Twitter comes with an additional burden of convincing the prospect into staying on the landing page and actually read on.

Why I say this is an additional burden is because with Twitter Traffic, there has been no “Pre-Sell” that’s convinced them into converting on the other side of the link. The only thing that’s inspired the click has been a reasonably captivating 140 character message in the form of a tweet. Nothing else exists to convince them of what’s at the other end, so theoretically, your Twitter driven prospects are only 5-10% aware of what they’re getting into, as opposed to perhaps 70-80% aware of what they’re getting into when the click on a link in an email describing what’s behind the link.

The very nature of the tweet triggers the need for having convincing “pre-sell” information located conveniently on the landing page such that it is the first thing the prospect sees.

This is extremely important if you’re going to have even the slightest hope of converting Twitter driven traffic in your Internet Marketing campaign.

In the case of tweets, all the hard work of convincing the prospect is done by the short 140 character message, whereas in the case of email-based Internet Marketing, all the hard work is done by the subject-line AND the body of the email that promotes what the subject-line is referring to. So an email has a better shot at convincing the reader than a tweet does, but a tweet has a better shot at making the user click on the link due to the short nature of the message allowing a “quick response” attitude to flourish.

Let’s take a look at the following screenshot for a second:

 

 

Notice how the number of “hops” to the ClickBank products you see is phenomenal for having come about in only 16 hours from Twitter traffic (pretty difficult to get this kind of traffic in Internet Marketing with just an email out to a list ;))

Now notice how NONE of the prospects to these pages converted to sales. Visiting the landing pages for these products reveals that they are all typically “hard-sell” pages with a “BUY NOW” style call to action, with little to no effort at actually convincing the prospects into taking that call to action.

The traffic you see in the screenshot above is amazing.. That’s over a thousand hits that have come in from just Twitter!

But has this traffic proven useful to our Internet Marketing campaign?

The answer there is a flat NO. 🙂

The reason for this horrible disaster of an Internet Marketing campaign is that the traffic came in with maybe 5% confidence about what they were getting into (just the text in the tweet where they clicked the link), and the landing pages didn’t help one bit by being geared only towards a sale and not much “pre-sell” evidence.

Think of it this way: Would you call up a friend, say one line about a great new product you had that could help him/her and ask them to go straight to your website and buy it right now?

Even a friend would think twice about it and want to be convinced.. Atleast a sensible friend would 😉

That proves my point about using Twitter for generating traffic in Internet Marketing, but optimizing your landing pages accordingly.

Most people in Internet Marketing are making the fundamental mistake of redirecting Twitter Traffic to landing pages optimized for visitors who’ve had some degree of convincing already, a model that won’t ever work. It’s like trying to convince a monkey to prefer a bone over a banana 😉

If you’ve read this post upto here, you will have realized that Twitter is amazing for generating traffic in the truck-loads, but this traffic needs to be treated as “luke-warm” traffic and every effort made to convince the prospects arriving from Twitter of the benefits of their having landed on the page to begin with. Twitter traffic needs to be “pre-sold” once they land on the page, so the chances of a subsequent “conversion” are increased.

I will be posting more case-studies soon of my experiments with Twitter Traffic on pages specifically optimized for visitors who’ve had nothing more than a “sentence” worth of an experience before clicking through to the page. I will showcase the differences between sending Twitter Traffic to sales pages and sending it to Free Giveaways and how Twitter can help build a massive email list of prospects if treated properly!

Until then, I hope you will be experimenting with Twitter Traffic yourselves after reading this post, it’s an exciting source of traffic for any Internet Marketing campaign, and if you can convert this traffic, you can dominate the scene very very quickly!

 

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About The Author (Facebook: http://facebook.com/as.khan.im | Twitter:http://twitter.com/asksatch):

Ali is also an Affiliate Marketer, Product Creation & Launch Consultant, Copywriter, and one of the most Highly Recognized Programmers in the Home Based Internet Marketing world, the Lead Technologist behind the Blockbuster Launch of The Internet Time Machine, and Search Engine NowRelevant.com, and mentioned in several International News Publications such as Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, NY Times, LA Times, and Reuters, to name a few, for his work.