When it first started out, Twitter was the realm for Internet geeks and social media fanatics, but it has since grown to include Hollywood celebrities, Washington politicians, and even major international corporations. As this demographic continued to grow, more and more people started to look for ways to make money on Twitter. It took a while for people to figure out how to make money on their blogs, so Twitter monetization is still in its relative infancy.
Before we proceed, it might be useful to brush up on your Twitter terminology and the rules of Twitter etiquette. With that out of the way, let’s see how we can make some money on the popular microblogging platform.
Sharing Links with Amazon Associates
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how the Amazon Associates (Canada) program expanded beyond regular links and banners to include in-text advertising. This is where Amazon would automatically replace phrases on your site with links to Amazon products.
Well, it seems that Amazon.ca is expanding again. As you can see from this screenshot, the Amazon Associates toolbar recently added a button to “Share on Twitter.” The toolbar used to only provide ad creatives to be placed on websites, so it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to promote books, DVDs, and video games on Twitter. Now you can. The Amazon Associates program is CPA-based, so you only make a commission when someone buys something.
Invading Twitter with Sponsored Tweets
Just as there are sponsored posts and paid reviews on blogs, it’s not surprising that Sponsored Tweets came along to capitalize on the Twitter market with sponsored messages on Twitter. The integration is actually very good, since the sponsored tweets go straight out from their website. You don’t need to copy-and-paste into your favorite Twitter client.
With Sponsored Tweets, advertisers can choose to either pre-write the tweet that they would like you to send out or they can ask you to write your own tweet including their link and name. The sponsored nature of the tweet must be disclosed and the easiest way to do this is by including the #ad hashtag. If you feel like sponsoring one of my tweets, check out my profile and follow the on-screen instructions.
Making Money with Affiliate Links
Affiliate marketing is hugely popular, so it’s not surprising that people are trying to push products on Twitter as well. When you log into your account at a CPA network like MarketLeverage, you can search for offers that are fair game for “social media.” From there, you can grab the offer link and share it on Twitter.
Just as with the Amazon Associates program described above, these affiliate links are based on a cost-per-action (CPA) model. In order for you to make money, the person clicking on the link will need to complete an action of some kind. He or she may need to submit an email address, fill out a registration form, or make a purchase.
Taking the Passive Income Route
The above three methods are much more direct ways to make money with Twitter, but the social networking aspect of Twitter lends itself to passive income too. More specifically, you can use your Twitter account for branding and networking purposes.
From time to time, I’ll make mention of my freelance writing business on Twitter or I’ll link to one of my blog posts here on Beyond the Rhetoric. These links may not make any money directly, but they can help you make money in the long run.
Have you started monetizing your Twitter stream? Why or why not?
Lots of this contributes to spam too…
No, it doesn’t. Spam is unwanted information. If you are following someone then you expect them to tweet and you are accepting what they tweet about. Spam is 5 or more tweets from someone you are following all within a minute or the same timestamp. The biggest offender? Guy Kawasaki
“If you are following someone then you expect them to tweet and you are accepting what they tweet about. Spam is 5 or more tweets from someone you are following all within a minute or the same timestamp.”
Isn’t that self-contradictory?
No, not really. I accept what someone is going to tweet, but there is a twitter etiquette that people for the most part follow. One of the things that falls under poor twitter etiquette is sending 5 or more tweets wit the same time stamp. That is an impossibility for any human and makes real tweets scroll off the screen too fast to even read.
Follow the rules and it’s fine.
I definitely agree. I myself is very fond of blogging at twitter and it really helps me to earn more income to support my needs at school. I am currently earning more than what I expect. Blogging at twitter was really a great income resources that many people could do anywhere they might be in the world.
Thanks for sharing the power of twitter in generating passive income. It also generates the passion for true freedom!
I liked this post alot. I recently started college and in need of some cash. This program looks very promising. It may be what Im searching for. I need to do some more research now on google. Thank you again for this awesome post. I will check out the rest of your blog
With havin so much content and articles do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright infringement?
My website has a lot of completely unique content I’ve either created myself or outsourced but it appears a lot of it is
popping it up all over the web without my authorization. Do you know any ways
to help prevent content from being ripped off?
I’d certainly appreciate it.
I have had to deal with this in the past. I sent a DMCA notification to the web host after unsuccessfully connecting with the site owner:
https://btr.michaelkwan.com/2009/05/30/how-to-deal-with-scrapers-dmca-notification/
The other thing that I’ve done is change from a full feed RSS to an excerpt RSS, as many of the scraping tools use RSS to get the content.