Tweet your way to making more money! Sounds like a false promise, doesn’t it? Most people don’t really consider Twitter to be a money making
tool, mostly because they use it for the purpose it was initially
intended for: to stay in touch with family and friends. But for anyone
who runs a blog or a business knows, Twitter has become an extremely
powerful tool in getting and keeping customers, and making money – all
in 140 characters or less.
If you’re looking for ways to really optimize your Twitter
to make either some extra spending money, or to completely replace your
current income, know that it is possible. While there are a number of
different ways to do this, we’re going to highlight the 4 ways that we
found were most successful for Twitter users.
Direct Advertising
Just recently a news story came out about Khloe Kardashian tweeting to her Twitter followers
to send a specific text to the WWF, and then a $10 donation would be
made to WWF per text. Within two short days, she raised over $6000 just
by asking her followers to do this. Now THAT’S good advertising.
Regardless of what your feelings may be when it comes to the
Kardashian clan, it’s easy to see that having someone with enough
Twitter followers endorse a particular product or give a particular
message will result in action. So if you have enough followers, you can
actually use your Twitter account to endorse products of services on
behalf of advertisers, and then encourage your followers to take action.
Alternatively, you can simply promote a new product by bringing it to
the attention of your followers, telling them why it’s great and how
they can benefit.
Now you may be saying to yourself, “This won’t work for me; I don’t
have any followers!” You may not have too many followers now, but it’s
really not too hard to boost the number of people who follow you. You
can use Twitter to hunt down people in your area who have the same
interest as you, and you can then “follow” them. 9 times out of 10
people you follow will follow you too. Find blogs and forums
that are of your interest and always include a “Follow me on Twitter”
type message at the bottom and give them your name. Make yourself as
accessible as possible.
TIP: Never forget just how valuable #hashtags can
be. Hashtags are a great way to easily keep track of responses, as well
as to follow the trail to see where your Twitter messages have ended up.
Create appropriate hashtags for the products or services that you
promote – this will also help maintain brand awareness.
Paid Review
This is similar to a direct advertisement,
but there’s a twist to it. Instead of simply telling your followers,
“Hey! Try this!” you are actually paid by an advertiser to write a
review about a product. You can post the review on your blog or website,
and then hit up Twitter and tell people about the product or service.
As an alternative to promoting products and services, you can also
promote people. There are a ton of individuals out there who want to get
noticed and who may actually be willing to drop some cash to get you to
spread the word about their good name. These people may be bloggers,
website owners, or web developers,
for example. Make sure you offer these services to up-and-coming
businesses and bloggers. You may be surprised by how much money you can
make.
TIP: In the world of bloggers, paid reviews for
products and services are somewhat frowned upon. Our recommendation is
that if you do a paid review, you include in your blog post that it is
just that – a paid review. If you don’t tell your followers, someone
else will, which can completely destroy your credibility.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing
works incredibly well with Twitter, and you can easily do this while
using any of the promotional strategies above. You can provide affiliate
links to the product or service you are promoting.
TIP: To really capitalize on space, make sure you
use the TinyURL.com service. This will shrink any website address so you
have more character space to write about the product.
If you choose to do affiliate marketing, it’s a wise idea to also create a landing page or sales page. You can send any followers to your landing page too rather than to your affiliate marketing link.
The best way to really optimize your affiliate marketing endeavour is
to make sure that whatever product it is that you’re marketing is
related to your niche.
There are a ton of junk affiliate marketing products out there, like
“get rich quick” and “lose weight fast” schemes. Go for quality products
that you feel passionate and excited about!
Sponsored Contest
This is another great option for anyone who has a good amount of
followers. With sponsored contests, an advertising agency may want to
run some sort of contest on Twitter to either a) get feedback about
their product or service, or b) generate brand awareness. You then have
the opportunity to step in and run the contest, and of course get some
good money out of the deal.
If you were to create a contest to gather some feedback, a good
example of a contest you could create would be, “What do you HATE about
‘x’ product?” The advertiser can then keep track of your followers’
responses and get some valuable marketing information. A random person
can be chosen as a winner and receive a prize from the advertiser.
You can drum up some brand awareness for an advertiser too by having a
contest such as “Tell us why you love ‘x’ Service in 140 characters or
less!” and again offer a neat prize as provided by the advertiser.
TIP: You may also want to look into ‘sponsored’
advertisements. Re-tweeting is a powerful thing, especially if you want
to create some brand awareness,
so why not encourage people to re-tweet a message? A message like
“Loving #MyNewSmartphone! Retweet this message and win a NEW HTC PHONE!”
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