Make Money with Twitter: Part 1

On September 18, 2010, in Advertising, Make Money, Marketing, by LuCuS

Getting the word out about a website or product can prove to be a big problem for a lot of marketers. However, it shouldn’t be. There are plenty of great tools out there that help you get the word out in-real-time and Twitter is no exception. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the world’s largest micro-blogging system, here’s a quick description. Twitter is another type of social networking site that works by allowing it’s users to send and read messages from anyone in the world at any time. Twitter messages, also known as “Tweets”, are text-based posts of up to 140 characters. Once a Tweet has been submitted, it becomes publicly viewable on the user’s profile page. Tweets are pubicly visible by default, but can be restricted to only a user’s friends list.

Users can subscribe to other author tweets by adding that author as a friend. Subscribing to other authors’ tweets is known as “following” and subscribers are known as “followers”. Users can also follow lists of authors as well as individual authors if they so choose. All users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, compatible external applications (such as smartphones), or by the Short Message Service (SMS) available in certain countries. While the service is free, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees.

Like all other social networking sites on the web, Twitter also provides ample opportunities to make some bank. Twitter itself does not have any source of noticable income. There are no advertisements of any kind on the Twitter website, they don’t sell products, and the Twitter service itself is free. So, how can we make money from it? The answer is in the numbers. There are plenty of companies out there that are willing to pay you a lot of money to advertise their products by telling your followers about them and generating leads for them. The more followers you have, the more money advertisers are willing to pay you.

Before diving into making money with Twitter, there are a few things you need to do first. The most obvious prerequisite to making money with Twitter is of course opening a Twitter account. To do that, point your browser to http://www.twitter.com and click the giant orange button that says “Sign Up”. Simply fill in the fields for name, username, password, & email and click the “Create my account” button. That’s all you have to do for setting up free Twitter account. The next few steps are completely optional, but feel free to pick a few topics you are interested in and follow some big name authors from those areas.

The next thing you need to do before making money with Twitter is to get a substantial amount of followers. After all, the more followers you have, the more money you’re going to make. The easiest way to get followers is by word-of-mouth. You can easily tell your friends and family that you now have a Twitter account. Ask them to create their own Twitter account for free and follow you. In return for following you, you can also follow them which will also increase their number of followers.

Another good way for adding followers is by following other authors. When you follow another author, an email is sent to that author informing them that you are now following them. And, 9 times out of 10, that author will return the gesture by following you in return. Unfortunately though, there are a lot of authors that will not do this in return and you’re stuck with their tweets intermingled in the rest of the tweets from other users you follow.

Aside from the few methods I’ve mentioned here for getting Twitter followers, there are a plethora of other techniques that you can use. However, I’d suggest a word of caution when using some of the other techniques. For instance, there are a lot of sites out there that claim to get you a boat load of followers simply by becoming a member of their site. But, the catch is that they ask you for your Twitter login username and password at which time they either sell your information or inject tweets into your stream. This isn’t the always the case, but it does still happen. So, be careful when using someone else’s service.

For now, focus on getting a large followers list. Spend some time writing some simple tweets that your followers might be interested in reading. Learn how to use the # and @ tags. Try to initiate conversations with other authors by posting tweets that are targeted toward specific followers. Ask questions. Ask specific authors questions in hopes that they will answer you back in a tweet. Having other authors answer you directly in a tweet can cause their readers to follow you as well so that they can keep up in the conversation.

In the next part of the “Make Money with Twitter” series, I’ll go into detail on how to find people to pay you to advertise their sites, businesses, and products. In fact, I will even introduce you to a few sites that will inject advertisements into your Twitter stream for you and you’ll be paid for every tweet they inject. You will have complete control over what advertisements they are allowed to post and how ofter they’re allowed to post. You can allow them to inject advertisements into your Twitter stream every 100 tweets, every 50 tweets, every 5 tweets, every other tweet, etc… But, like I said, for now you need to focus on getting some followers. In fact, feel free to follow me and in return I will follow you. You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ProxyProdigy. Also, don’t hesitate to add your Twitter URL in the comments below. You never know, some of this sites’ readers might be willing to follow you too!