Just about every affiliate marketing “guru” these days is ready to tell you how to get Twitter followers and make money with Twitter in one of a dozen ways.  Most gurus will only tell you half the story, though.  They often don’t tell you the kinds of mistakes you should avoid.

Don’t add too many people at a time.

Not only does this look spammy, it will also make your “following” number much larger than your “follower’s” score.  Even the people who don’t think this is spammy will likely view your account as a less attractive one to follow, if there’s this wide disparity.

(If you follow fewer people than are following you, that’s fine.  In fact, it’s the preferred situation!)

Don’t just tweet links to your site.

Nobody is following your account because they want to help you make money with twitter.  The same thing that goes for list marketing goes for Twitter marketing as well: people are only going to sign up if they think they can get something out of it.

If you want people to click your links, you’ve got to give them a reason to.  If you do nothing but send people to your website with your links, people will stop clicking through pretty quickly.

That’s why you need to post interesting, relevant material that doesn’t necessarily go to your site.  There are several services that will allow you to plug RSS news feeds (such as Google alerts) into your site.

Another great option is to re-tweet interesting posts from the people you follow.  Not only will this give you some interesting material to send out to your followers–it will usually result in your own material going viral from time to time.