Twitter Monetization: How to Make Money With Twitter

Everyone seems to like twitter these days which is a really cool way of staying in touch with your customers, friends & colleagues. Basically twitter has presented itself as a micro-blogging platform where a user can shout out anything they want to his ‘followers’ within the limit of 140 characters.

I have just started twittering since last month (*yes I’m pretty late starter!) because initially by looking at it for the very first time, I couldn’t find any ‘value’ that it has for my work & my social life. However after reading a convincing post by Aaron Wall, I thought of giving twitter a try. Since then onwards I have been using twitter all day long, just to keep track of some of the leading experts in the Internet & Search Marketing field as well as to have some ‘fun’ with my online buddies.
Anyway the whole point of doing this post is to highlight some of the key monetization elements that an individual can explore using twitter. I assume you have the basic knowledge of what twitter is and how it works, so I will directly deep into some ideas which can make you earn money from your twitter.

• Direct Advertisement – If a lot of people are following you in ‘twitter’ or in other words if you have a ‘wide reach’ to a large number of twitter users, you can probably look into direct advertisements for monetization.

• Recommendation – You can recommend a particular product or service on behalf of your advertisers & peruse your followers to take an ‘action’.
• Promotion – You can help your advertiser to promote a new product or service to your twitter followers.

It works pretty much like niche marketing because, say if you are an Internet Marketer, It is very likely that most of your followers in Twitter are also from the same area which is why they have ‘followed’ you in the first place.

Affiliate Marketing – I was listening to Shoemoney’s podcast yesterday where he talked about how affiliate marketing can actually be blended within Twitter.

• Affiliate Links – If you are recommending a Product or a Service to your followers, you can always embed your affiliate link in your tweet. (e.g. Using a service like TinyUrl.com)
• Sales Pages – Instead of taking your followers to another website using your affiliate link, you might just want to promote your own product & services and sell them directly via your sales / landing page.

This is an area where every one can really look into. For instance say when one of your followers is asking for suggestion to choose a web host, you can always suggest him the best one from your experience but at the same time use your affiliate link which can earn you some quick cash.

Paid Review– This is pretty much like the direct advertisement, however the only difference would be, instead of blindly suggesting a product or a service to someone, you can actually do some ‘paid reviews’.

• Product – You can do a paid review about a particular product (e.g. Internet Marketing software)
• Services – You can do a paid review about services that your advertiser offers. (E.g. SEO Services, Web Hosting Services etc.)
• People – You can also do a paid review about people. For instance, maybe you can review someone’s web design skills, or you may promote someone’s ‘twitter’ account for instance.

Sponsored Contest– An advertiser may want to run a contest via a popular twitter user to get feedback about his product & services or just to create some brand awareness.

• Feedback – Example – “What New features would you like to see in Product X”?
• Brand Awareness– Example- “Describe product X in 140 Characters” or “Tell us why you like product X within 140 Characters”. The best answer can be given a cool prize sponsored by the advertiser.

Sponsored Advertisements– There isn’t must difference between this & the direct advertisement. However when I was creating the mind map, this ‘branch’ did somehow pop in, so have decided to include it. I guess the main difference would be that all the tweets which are actually sponsored advertisements can get a predefined prefix which will help your followers to identify them as ads.

• Auto Ads – There can be a mechanism or a ‘new’ 3rd party service which can actually help you to distribute or Tweet the “Ads” when you are ‘not’ tweeting or say when you are idle. An ad interval can also be set so that your frequent sponsored ads don’t annoy your followers.
• Sponsored Actions– Well this might sound like a weird idea but, I feel that some aggressive marketers might like it. Example – “I Love #Google. Re-tweet this message and WIN yourself a GPhone”. Since a hash-tag is used, all the massages can be tracked using that and a lucky winner can actually be picked from the pool.

Some of you may think that all these ‘monetizing’ options can actually turn twitter into an ‘evil’ place and slowly reduce its value. But let’s face it, if you aren’t fully utilizing all the areas of twitter today, somebody else will – tomorrow. But of course you should set a ‘limit’ on how many ‘such tweets’’ you are going to do on a day, so that your followers still consider you as a valuable contact rather than a commercial junkie.
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