Pranav at FinalTag picked up on my posts about TwitterLit and what Debra is building there and also discusses a similar Twitter (micro-blog) affiliate, DealTwit…

Smart affiliates have finally begun monetizing twitter, and they are doing it in very creative ways. This is good stuff, Affiliate marketing 2.0.

This is very good stuff. Remember in 2004 when blogging was really starting to take off in a mainstream fashion and some people started using affiliate links to monetize their audiences and content? There was quite a vocal group who scoffed at those attempts and held that blogging and affiliate marketing could never mix. Only static html pages with fat keyword meta tags in their code could be successful.

The same thing is beginning to happen with micro-content sites such as Twitter. Pranav brings up this question with the size of audience…

I’m not sure how much success this can be, Dealtwit only has 17 followers as of now, Twitterlit, on the other hand, has as many as 109 followers, both have taken the right step in a direction.

Good question, Pranav.

However, Twitter affiliates, or micro-content affiliates, don’t have to necessarily rely on the size of audiences, page views or impressions as a determinant of success.

In other words, affiliate marketing, in this context as well as niche marketing, is moving away from the dogmatic belief that you have to have a mass appeal affiliate site with tons of traffic in order to turn a profit or to make a decent amount of money.

Metrics like “conversion rates” and “clicks to conversions” are becoming obsolete because they can’t measure what Pranav calls successful branding or what can also be described as having an influence over a set community.

109 viewers sounds almost silly for an affiliate site. But, check out some of Debra’s audience (sidebar on the right). Those people have faces and names. They are not just idle clickers from a keyword buy. You can see her widget over on my sidebar to your right. That’s powerful and that’s the future.

When will we start seeing Twitter or micro-blog specific content from the merchants and networks?