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!”