Before I dive into this tatic, I wanted to take a step back to say, if you are NOT on twitter, WTF people! Seriously, it’s a great way to market your product and create that one on one dialog with your customers as well as improve yourself by building your own personal brand. You can also create that dialog with your friends and keep upto date with what is going on and ask them about it the next time you meetup.
So while checking my inbox of new twitter followers, I got the standard message, but this time there were more links then normal. This email contained 3 links to the user’s website and only one to there profile.
Here is the email I received.
Hi, John Murch (jmurch)
rustydeals.com (rustydeals) is now following your updates on Twitter.Check out rustydeals.com‘s profile here:
You may follow rustydeals.com as well by clicking on the “follow” button.
Best,
Now realize that the link to his profile is a link because gmail, outlook or your mail clients will take a phase-with-a.com and turn it into a clickable link. So when I click to view his profile, I am actually being taken to his website. So only 1 out of the 4 links are to his twitter profile where the others are to his website. So from a marketing stand point, each person you follow, if they read the message and click a link you have a 1 in 4 shot of having them click on your website link and not the profile link.
Now really what is going on is he just replaced the name field of twitter with his domain in this case, rustydeals.com
I feel this is a Black Hat tatic to get people to click through to your website, but I would love to get your comments and feedback, what do you think?
It may also be a cool way that Twitter, and the person twitter-ing, are building their backlinks. With tons and tons of backlinks to Twitter and to th guy’s site, his site gains more authority and popularity in the search engines. This, ultimately, may increase his page rank and organic position for keywords he is targeting on his website.
Just a thought -
We have never had an automated response to any follows. EVER! When responding to a new follow we have always found out what we are responding too… If we our followers are growing faster than we can respond we don’t respond at all.. We will not auto reply to anything. If we can not reply we don’t and do a broadcast thank you..
I would like to know the date you received this response.
Thank you, Ty
Ty Hildebrand
Co Founder | Rustydeals.com
So you may not automate your response, but by having your rustydeals.com as the name, you are targeting users by email in hopes that their email client will convert this into a clickable link and get more traffic to your site. I am just revealing this black hat tactic in my opinion. You followed me on Jan 23, 2009, so this is the date that I found out about this tactic.