Viral List Building On Twitter?

In the past year or so we have been seeing a lot of different viral list building systems come to light in the Internet Marketing world. Viral list building has certainly gained a lot of attention, with many angles being attempted, but not all of them have been created equally that’s for sure.

The people who do know me most will tell you that I am mainly a huge supporter of Viral Spiral.

In reality, although many other types of systems have come out, certainly there weren’t any with the originality, flexibility, or  power in which Viral Spiral possesses.

We have also seen huge, huge problems with mail delivery. It got so bad with one of my accounts, I simply canceled my subscription to the service. It’s unfortunate, as tons of people in that account probably hadn’t even known I tried to switch them to another service because they simply wouldn’t have received my notice about it. Yes…the delivery was that bad! And that was after running every message I’d ever sent through that account had first been tested by a spam rating, to see if it would be seen as “spam” or not. Needless to say,  for any one who ever asks, I will explain to them who “not” to use for the email services!

It’s unfortunate, but even with great viral list building programs email marketing is getting tougher and tougher. Upon speaking with some marketers recently, even with the highly prized Aweber and Get Response accounts, they are still experiencing some delivery problems. Things have definitely been getting rough, and unfortunately, it’s all been happening because of the increase in spammers on the internet. Many spam filter systems have such high enforcement settings, it’s making it very hard for most legitimate mail to get through.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t get at least 150 spam messages in my inbox, from sources I have absolutely no clue of. I’ve never opted in to any such list of these people. How so many spammers have ended up with my personal home email address and how they figure it gives them the right to spam the heck out of us is a complete mystery to me? It’s even more surprising, that these people don’t realize or care that they have pretty much had a huge stake in killing the online email industry with their spamming, leaving it very difficult for honest and ethical marketers to maintain and build their business.

If you are using a viral list building system or not, it’s important that you are aware of these problems that are occuring. It’s also important that you try and find some ways to circumvent the problem, so we can be more efficient as marketers in the future. If we don’t it’s going to hurt those who use list building as their main business model to a severe degree in the future years.

So what are people doing about it?

A lot of people are turning to the Social Media sites as part of their answer in getting their messages through. In many ways, a friends list can sort of be like an email list. Many marketers are starting to use sites like Facebook in this way, and are having a fair bit of success with it. The real problem with Facebook being used in this way though, is that a person can only send a message to 20 friends at a time. Rightly so though, they certainly don’t want it to become the Spamfest that MySpace became. As far as MySpace goes…well so many people jumped on that band wagon that from what I understand, marketing in MySpace in this fashion these days is pretty much a dead fish.

Today, the hot spot is Twitter.

The last few days, I’ve been setting up a system which not only builds your followers in Twitter, but, in Twitter..your messages are guaranteed to be delivered. There is no such thing as all of these filters being in place as with what’s happening with email.

Twitter is known as MicroBlogging. There are some people that are using Twitter for their marketing efforts but in reality, we are only seeing the very beginnings of using Twitter in this way. And also, we are only learning of proven methods for using Twitter for these reasons. Much, the same as building a relationship with subscribers on an email list, to use Twitter effectively, we must also build positive relationships with people following you on Twitter. The people following you on Twitter also must have some sort of interest in the same niche in which you are in for it to work successfully as well.

Last week Howie Shwartz and Eric Rockefellor came out with a system known as the Google Wealth Maker. I became quite interested in this, as I’ve been learning quite a lot from Howie Shwartz about Twitter through Social Power Linking, and he also addresses how it virtually eliminates the problem with email delivery in that training as well. The real gem of this system, is that once everything is set up, it will almost run on autopilot for it’s users. I say almost, because in complete automation mode, it certainly won’t build the types of relationships with people on the receiving end of your messages in a completely automated mode. And of course, this is of high importance.

I chose to wait a week or so to write about this system, as I really wanted to see if it did indeed work for myself first before I pointed any others towards it. Well, it does indeed work, and in a way it’s almost like using a viral list building system. The system actually goes out and you start following people on Twitter based on keyword or niche entry, if you will. In turn, many of these people you follow end up following you, which is the desired outcome. After trying it for a few days, it’s definitely doing exactly what it says it will do.

There is a little controversy around this system right now, as being considered a bit “black hat”, but, when you really think about it, it’s no different than going out and finding friends anywhere else like on Facebook. Actually, it’s one step better, because, the people that are added to your Twitter account following you, only do so if they choose to. It’s almost like double opt-in if you think about it that way. It also doesn’t go against any of Twitter’s TOS and is considered perfectly acceptable by Twitter. I’m really not sure if Howie Shwartz arranged something with Twitter themselves or not. But, in reality, that wouldn’t surprise me, since Howie Shwartz is such a mega force in the online scene.

When using a system like the Google Wealth Maker, as with anything else, you will want to do some good in depth research first to find out if they particular market you are going to find followers in will indeed be profitable. Out of anything so far, this has been where most of my time setting this up has been. But, the research will indeed pay off. You can actually set up 20 different accounts and all of them being in completely separate niches if you like. If you don’t want others to know exactly which niches you may be in, you can always use pseudo names. Marketers have been using pseudo names for a long time, as to protect their niches, so in this sense it’s not really any different.

While I will admit, that researching and setting things up does take some time, it’s definitely a system worth looking into. It will not only help you in getting messages delivered if you are fed up with the problems happening with email marketing, but, it will also allow you to set up much of the processes on autopilot. Having things automated is something every marketer could use a little more of.

Is it viral list building? Well, it doesn’t really have any viral characteristics to it, but the automation of it is certainly welcome in every way.

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Technorati Tags: Google Wealth Maker, microblogging, Twitter, Viral List Building