Make Money With Twitter

It cannot be denied that Twitter is taking the online marketing world by storm. A reported 10,000 new user’s sign up to the site every day, so harnessing it as a make money tool is not that surprising considering the marketing potential that resides there.

In the last 6 months a number of corporations have jumped on the Twitter band wagon, and the opportunities they have brought with them are quite tempting:

• Directing advertising (promotions and recommendations)
• Affiliate marketing (affiliate links and sales pages)
• Paid reviews (product, services, people)
• Sponsored advertisements (auto ads, sponsored actions).

There is plenty for you to choose from if you are genuinely interested in monetising a tool that you already use naturally every day.

The only recommendation we have is that you don’t excessively use these marketing techniques to the point where your followers are turned off by your tweets. Why? Because they will detract from the original purpose of Twitter – to establish friendships and become a part of a community.

Direct Advertisements

These are perfect if you have already got a large following on Twitter and have a reach that will ensure your posts always attract attention.

There are two routes you can follow with this monetization technique: recommendation and promotion.

• Recommendation – here you simply recommend a particular product/service on the behalf of your advertiser and take advantage of the opportunity to persuade your followers to take ‘action’
• Promotion – similar to the one above, here you take more of a promotion stance where you directly promote a new product/service to your followers

There are a number of models available that you can use to boost your revenues. Magpie is particularly good for inserting automatic tweets into your account on the behalf of advertisers.

With their model you can control how often you allow advertisers to Tweet through your account as well as arrange a regular monthly income based on your current Twitter usage.

An even simpler way to directly advertise a product is with Twittad. Using their model, it inserts your sponsor’s messages directly into your Twitter background.

And both of these are pretty profitable. With Magpie alone you can earn up to $200 a month which is not bad considering they are paying you for using something you love.

Affiliate Marketing

You are probably wondering how affiliate marketing can relate to Twitter, but it is surprisingly easy to blend into your account, as we will now prove:

• Affiliate Links – if you are already promoting a product/service to your followers, then embedding an affiliate link into your Tweet is another sure way to track your leads and ensure you gain credit for your conversions
• Sales Page – as a further step you can use your affiliate links to directly take your followers to your own products/services via a sales focused landing page

Take the following scenario. One of your followers is requesting advice on how to find a good hosting website. Through your response you can suggest a web host – who you feel is the best in your experience – and at the same time add your affiliate link to the Tweet to earn some extra quick cash.

Paid Reviews

Paid reviews are quite similar to direct advertising, but the fundamental difference you will find here is instead of suggesting a product, you will write some ‘paid reviews’.

And these can be split into 3 types

• Product – you review a particular product
• Services – you do a paid review about the service your advertisers offer
• People – you review an actual person’s work. You can even go to the extent of promoting someone else’s Twitter account

This one is probably one of the harder methods to tackle, but by reviewing the product/ service yourself you can enhance the credibility of why you are tweeting about them.

Sponsored Ads

These are essentially the same as direct ads, but this time your followers will easily be able to identify them as ads. If you are interested in this type of approach, we recommend you try the following:

• Auto Ads – these are often 3rd party services that help you to distribute and Tweet your ads when you are not online or are idle. To make sure this is not excessive you can set it so that they appear only at specific intervals and times

Now obviously don’t do all of these strategies at the same time as this will annoy your followers and more importantly will make you look like a commercial junkie rather than a real individual.

The trick is to use these methods subtly and ensure that you have first got a strong enough following to accommodate these techniques before you begin tweeting about products. By developing trust amongst your followers; when you begin to promote/advertise products within your tweets, your following will be prepared and willing to read them.