There’s been a bunch of discussion on the adult webmaster forums about whether Twitter is worth the effort. For starters, I sorta enjoy it. I think that’s important (for any endeavor). But it does indeed work - I’ve seen sales on sites that I almost never blog, but right after I tweet a sponsor’s blog post or gallery on them I’ll see a sale. Thing is,  you’ve gotta get the right strategy down.

What To Tweet, When To Tweet

I do a combination of personal tweets (when I’m out at bars, when a trick is coming over, etc) and porn tweets. You gotta find your own voice and balance. Obviously you’re not going to make money saying your at some bar, or commenting on the movie you just watched, but that may make you seem less commercial and make it more likely people will follow you. But as far as what you can use - sponsor blog posts, your own blog posts, your tube site videos, sponsor gallery pages… The list is pretty endless. If it’s gay porn and it’s hot, then people will want to see it.

It’s a good idea to Tweet at all hours of the day. Twitter is a definite case of “what have you done for me lately?” Tweets have a very short lifespan. You will find tweeting during the evening (in the US) is probably the most profitable since you have the most people actively looking at Twitter, but don’t forget people in other parts of the world…

Bit.ly - A key piece in the puzzle…

Bit.ly is extremely useful for making Twitter perform. It shortens your URLs for you, shows you stats on how many people clicked through, where they came from, etc. Here’s the general interface…

But you can get more in depth data as well. As you can see I’ve had 2,368 clicks just in the past week - not bad given that I only have about 450 followers so far. Here’s the clicks for the past month…

The low days in the past week were when my Internet connection was down. You can sorta see when I got the hang of it and my clicks started increasing…

Now Bit.ly isn’t just a URL shortener, you can actually tweet from Bit.ly. After you shorten a URL it gives you the option to tweet the URL. VERY handy!

The other advantage is that as the search engines start integrating Twitter content into their search results Bit.ly is the URL shortener that they support best (so far). For starters, Bit.ly does 301 redirects, so you get full credit for the link. But more than that the search engines don’t use the Bit.ly URL, they ignore that and act as if your URL is the one that was twittered (or is that tweeted?)

Twitter Badges For Your Website

One of the key ways to get more people to click on your links is to get more people to see your tweets. I’ve only got 450 followers but I get a decent amount of clicks. You want as many people to see your tweets as possible - so basically you want to be seen by more than just people on Twitter. One of the key tools here is to use a Twitter “badge” which shows your most recent tweets. Here’s mine (which is located in the sidebar of my main blogs)…

This basically gives you the chance to do what I’d call “microblogging”. It only take a few minutes a day to put out 5 or 10 tweets with links, but it would take far longer to do 5 or 10 blog posts / TGP galleries, etc. This is where you can let sponsors do the work for you. All you have to do is cull through what they’ve done and tweet it.

As you can see, all my Bit.ly links are clickable from the badge my web site - which greatly increases my clicks. You can see in the graph further up in the post that I get half my clicks from rawtop.com - nearly twice as much as I get from twitter.com. If you have big porn sites, this is a great way to get more exposure even if you’re just starting out with Twitter and don’t have many followers.

My Future Plans

One of my goals is to automate my tweets, so I can prep them at the same time as my blog posts and then I can have a database app post the tweets when the blog posts go live. That will require working with the Bit.ly API and the Twitter API. Should be a fun project if I can find the time for it.

I also want to figure out how to increase my number of followers with people who are genuinely interested - not just with bots (if only I had $10 for every bikini-clad girl I’ve blocked from following me). I thought having the badge on my site would help, and it has a little, but not as much as I was hoping for.