How to Make Money on Twitter

Before we go diving off into my strategy, there may be some of you who haven't completely decided whether or not you should use Twitter for business purposes. Whether your intent is to just make some fast cash on Twitter or to promote a larger scale service, you might want to have a look at this free report:

How Twitter can Help (or Harm) Your Business

The first thing that you will need (and perhaps the most painfully obvious) is a Twitter account. From my experience, you most likely don't want some generic niche account.

"Isn't that against EVERYTHING we've ever heard?"

Yeah, it most likely is. And here's my reasoning: they look spammy. If I see one of my followers without a real image avatar spewing out nothing but advertisements, they get the big unfollow. Now if they have something to contribute to my life beyond ads, like conversation, then maybe they will live to see another day on my list.

I'm going to use my own account as an example here. You might want to click here and follow me to see what I'm talking about. If you look through my timeline, you will see some ads, but you will also notice that I am a real person, contrary to what my wife might say. That means I'm not just a Twitter spam bot, and if you talk to me, I will be likely to respond to you. This helps to establish trust with your followers.

Now, allow me to contradict myself just a bit on the niche issue. You don't want to have a specific niche, but you can target a few. Why do this? Because most real people have more than one area of interest, right? If you check my Twitter profile (which you should be following by now), you will notice that most of my posts deal either with affiliate marketing or politics. Or my crappy internet connection. Or maybe even some other random complaint. Either way, I'm real. What does this mean? It means that I'm not limiting myself to people who only follow one niche.

"OK, got the Twitter account. Now what?"

The next thing you will want to do is to use the account. You don't want people to see your Tweet stream all nakers, do you? Make friends, chat, read, enjoy.

And then, after you build your tweet count, you will want to be sure that you have a PayPal account. Most likely, if you are trying to make money online, you have this, so I won't linger on it.

No, this plan doesn't involve using the PayPal account for making purchases. You will only be using it to collect your money.

Oh, before I forget...you might want to use a good strategy to build your followers. DO NOT feel like you have to pay some service to add to your follower count...that's garbage. Here's my strategy for building Twitter followers. Learn it. Use it.

Followers are key! You won't be making anything on Twitter without them, so be sure to work on this!

And now, lets get into this a bit deeper, shall we?

The first method we will discuss will be cost per click (CPC) ads. The first thing you need to know about these ads are that not every affiliate network will allow you to use them on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. so you need to be sure that you read the terms of service for each network and campaign.

Not all affiliate networks have CPC ads, and those that do are either rare or set up to handle them in the first place. I'd like to tell you about a couple of the networks that I am using.

The first one is Logical Media. I LOVE this network. It is pretty rare that they have CPC campaigns, but when they do they are definitely worth milking...which I am doing. You will have to dig for it, but there is currently one campaign that is working out wonderfully for me...to the tune of about $0.10 per click. Now, that might not sound like much, but when I post the message I get anywhere from 5 to 40 clicks. That's with ONE tweet. I'll let you do the math on this and how it can add up.

If you are not a member of Logical Media, I highly recommend checking them out. The banner below will take you directly to their site.



The second network I want to share is SocialSpark. They have a much greater amount of CPC campaigns to choose from, however many of the clicks come back as invalid. Don't worry, you can still score tons of valid clicks with them. I'd recommend checking them out. Hey, the more sources you can find for CPC ads, the better.

Our next method is a bit controversial. Some people detest the thought of selling Twitter posts. Personally, I like it because it takes very little effort and it puts cash in your PayPal account.

There are a couple of different ways to do this. A while back, I would simply post a message on Digital Point offering my tweet services. DP eventually banned this practice. Fortunately, I've built up a small list of people who have purchased from me before, and I can still market to them.

You could probably also set up something on your blog to get people to sponsor your tweets. Or you could send messages out to your Twitter friends...but I don't really recommend this.

There is a great service out there called Magpie that pays you for tweets. This is another one of my major Twitter pay day programs. The pay rate varies based on the number of followers you have. To put this in perspective, when I joined Magpie, I was getting around 0.21 Euros per tweet (they also had a 50 Euro payout threshold). Now I have around 3,000 followers and I'm getting over 9 Euros per tweet. They have also lowered they payout level to 30 Euros. And yes, they pay via PayPal (who will take care of the money conversion for you, or you can select your preferred denomination in the settings).

They also have an affiliate program. How does this benefit you? If you find someone who wants to purchase a tweet from you, you can refer them to Magpie and get a cut of their advertising costs. Nice, eh?

I highly recommend joining Magpie. If you want to check them out, just click on the banner below.



HINT: In your Magpie settings, I recommend you turn the pre-approval feature OFF so that your matching tweets are automatically sent, and that you select to BLOCK all PER LEAD and PER SALE tweets. Yes, this cuts off those type of ads, but with those, you don't get paid unless someone purchases something or fills out a form. With the other two options enabled (PER VIEW and PER CLICK), you will get more bang for the advertisers buck.

RevTwt

Another great network where you can get paid for using Twitter is RevTwt. This network is very similar to Magpie, except that they seem to have a far bigger list of opportunities available. And as you know, the more offers you can tweet, the more money you can make. They also have some cost per click ads for Twitter, so you definitely will want to check out RevTwt.

I recommend checking out RevTwt. If you would like to learn more about RevTwt, the banner will take you to their site.

Another service I use to monetize my Twitter account is a bit different than the previous two methods. It basically sells ad space in the background of my Twitter profile (and also sends a couple of tweets). The most popular service for this, which is what I prefer to use, is Twittad.

There aren't a whole lot of details about Twittad that I can just go off on, because it really is that simple. You sync your Twitter account with them, they email you when you have an offer, and you either accept or deny. The rest is automatic.

If you would like to give Twittad a spin, the following banner will take you directly to their site.

That's it. That's the current strategy that I'm using to make money with Twitter. And yes, it does work, so long as you remember the rules:

1. Followers are KEY!
2. CPC is your friend!
3. Don't overdo the sponsored tweets. Keep it balanced.
4. Be real. Don't be a spambot.

It's not difficult to do, it just takes some work. OK, it really doesn't take that much work...heh.

Oh, be sure to check out my blog for more stuff about Twitter...just use the search feature at the top right and search for...uh...'twitter'.