The Twitter Traffic Machine scam exposed
It’s time to expose another Twitter scam. The Twitter Traffic Machine, the brainchild of self titled social networking evangelist and professional monopoly player Bill Crosby, makes it’s ugly presence felt all over the Twittersphere with alarming regularity. The reason for it’s obscene level of penetration is pretty obvious to anyone used to this sort of junk. It’s seen as an easy sell and is picked up by thousands of con artists, happy to push their affiliate links in direct messages all day long, desperately trying to make a quick buck.
The Twitter Traffic Machine is a series of videos that claim to explain how to grow a Twitter following on autopilot. Claims are made about how anyone can grow their following from zero to thousands in a matter of days, all with no effort, all on autopilot, all automated.
All lies. All a con. All a scam.
Hopefully anyone reading this will think twice before parting with their cash. And then, if Crosby’s income stream dries up, he will go away and stop infecting Twitter with his junk. Better still, take action against this sort of infringement and force Crosby and his pan handling ilk out of the Twittersphere.
Here’s how The Twitter Traffic Machine works. Or, more accurately, doesn’t work.
The instructions are very simple. Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.
Step one. Start a Twitter account, upload your photo, choose a pretty background image and write some witty text in your profile. Bill Crosby says that calling himself a social networking evangelist and professional monopoly player makes him appear interesting and encourages you to come up with something equally entertaining.
Step two. Search Twitter for people who have accounts in your chosen Niche and follow them to get the ball rolling. Make good use of your initial 2,000 follows limit to kick start some interest.
Step three. Set up a Google account and generate a Google alert RSS feed for search results using keywords in your niche.
Step four. Open a Tweet Later account and pump your Google alert RSS feed into your Twitter account.
Step five. Configure your Tweet Later account to make your Twitter account follow everyone who follows you and unfollow anyone who unfollows you.
Step six. Add your affiliate link, selling The Twitter Traffic Machine in your automatic direct message that is sent out to everyone who follows you. Also add your affiliate link to Tweet Later, ensuring that it is posted to your Twitter account at regular intervals.
That’s it. Nothing but automated blog spam applied to a Twitter account. Particularly nasty is The Twitter Traffic Machine’s ability to persuade both gullible Twitter users and gullible affiliate marketers, ensuring it’s virus like ability to scatter it’s marketing junk all over the Twittersphere.
It creates a Twitter account that is pumped with Google alert results at regular intervals. This results in your Twitter account appearing in Twitter search results for your chosen keywords and, possibly, being followed by other Twitter users.
However, the reason why the system ultimately fails is, just like Brute Force Twitter, it only attracts zombies.
Two types of Twitter users will see your automatic and fake Twitter account. Genuine users and spammers. The spammers, including other automated accounts, will follow you but the genuine users will do one of two things. They will either ignore you or report you.
At best you will have a Twitter account that is able to add thousands of robot followers every few weeks, at worst you will get your account suspended and deleted as more and more users issue complaints.
This can all be stopped very easily. If enough people issue complaints to Twitter about Bill Crosby and his friend the Brute Force Idiot action will eventually be taken.
Don’t believe it. The Twitter Traffic Machine is nothing but a scam.
Twitter is powerful when it’s used correctly. And, thankfully, worse than useless when it’s used incorrectly.
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Ashley Morgan is a UK jazz trumpet player and owner of independent record label 447 Records.
Ashley Morgan is the trumpet player with Enormous.
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Great post it really gave me a bigger insight to twitterspam(twitter is not that big here in sweden yet, so i am not that informed about its mechanics. I would really appriciate if you put your entire posts in the news feed, because it would make it à lot easier to read it on My cellphone. also you would probably keep your redders longer and get more readers and traffic from services such as twingly.com
Great follow up to your MySpace post, Ashley.
With that post in mind, we see how people are poisoning a social networking platform. Enouraging spam, turning it into a mindless drone, promising a number of followers for a disinterested click … ugh.
Among all the social networking platforms that have come along, Twitter has something incredibly important – Charm.
It’s such a devalued attribute in these times. But I, a once Twitter hater, have come to enjoy Twitter. It’s not for any direct marketing purpose. I enjoy its charm of its limited character posts. It makes you think, while encouraging spontaneity, while being, well, damn cute.
If there is any marketing to be done on Twitter, it will be residual. As a marketer, I’m not interested in a disinterested click to my site. I want someone that wants to know more, needs to know more. Twitter provides that through the forgotten skill of charm.
As opposed to MySpace, though, it’s interesting to see that the poisoning is coming from its users and not management.
It seems like there are a ridiculous amount of twitter scams going around these days. This one is particularly tragic. You’d think by step three one of the members would say, “hey, this doesn’t look right.” If you’re not even using your twitter account to interact or market, why do you need it?
Great post – helps us “genuine” people look out for virtual pests. Machines are tools, so we must not rely on it to do ALL our bidding. Karma will eventually kick back, in some form another, if you want to cheat life and just make money without doing any work.
Once again, great post :) Keep it up!
Is your view that any automated software is bad when it comes to managing followers on twitter? I know there are some packages out there that help find followers based on keywords, so you are at least getting your name out there in your niche. I think this could be a good approach on finding people that could be interested in your content.
Hi Ashley,
Great post! It is time that someone finally outed those guys and I couldn’t agree with you more. I do however think that you can use auto DM’s in a tasteful manner and auto following software can be used to find users in your niche, but with all marketing tools there are users that will abuse them. But these guys are pure spammers and give the making money on twitter niche a bad rap. Just like blogging, there are legitimate ways to make money on twitter and ways to do it without being a complete spammer. I’m so sick of seeing there links everywhere, and even as a make money on twitter blogger I would never promote their system.
Kudos Ashley!
Finally a reviewer who’s not trying to sell a product and make a commission. Thank GOD! Thank you for saving me $27.00
Thank you so much for this expose Ashley – as if we don’t have enough spam in our lives. I did buy this product but did not fully implement it. I have to admit that I learnt a lot from it about twitter tools and for the most part I get targetted followers – haven’t sold one book yet though :(. Hopefully this will come as I send out more quality tweets – which I write personally BTW. Twitter has put me in touch with some lovely, helpful people.
Best wishes,
Kristina Kaine
I am glad I found you and checked this out. This video is getting more and more pushes on Twitter. I don’t really understand all this get rich quick without effort junk, I would simply like a few more hits on my sites and maybe a sale or two, so I am glad to see I am not alone. The latest nasty rash BTW is affiliate destruction. I think it has to do with hijacking rss blog feeds to misdirect sales away from other people’s pages? They do the work, some spammer gets the misdirected sale. Nasty…. I shall favourite this site. :)
Hey,
you just saved me 27 bucks! Thank you, Ashley.
Thank you so much for this info!!! I will be passing this on to everyone I know on Twitter.
I was blasted by links for the Twitter Traffic Machine after doing a Google search this morning. I knew it was a scam from the start, but was curious as to how this particular method worked. The lack of information (and the mountains of positive testimonials) on their site is surely a giveaway. In typical scammer fashion, I like how he also requires a name and email before the poor suckers who fall for it can move on to get additional ordering information. Hopefully everyone is supplying fake addresses!!!
@detroitj0e (that’s a zero in the joe)
I was just doing some research into this. And I can now thank you for saving me the money. There always has to be that one rather large scam. I guess this is it for twitter. Thanks for the info. I will be linking to this for sure.
The percentage of people that follow me that I block is over 50%. This sort of thing is why. Why do I want loads of Twitter followers that happen to use a keyword in an irrelevant context or pick me up doing the same? I don’t as it’s rubbish.
Great article.
Great explanation of how a scam works. Thanks.
Bravo!
I get so tired of seeing all of the MLM zombies falling for this stuff and polluting my tweet stream with links to this garbage! Good for you for having the guts to ‘out’ these guys. I’m posting a link to this article on my Twitter page, which will probably lose me some followers, but will gain me great satisfaction!
This almost sounds a bit illegal, or at the least kinda like a multi-level marketing scheme like Amway has always been. I don’t understand what all these people are selling to make the money they say is coming in?