What is Twitter?
Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networking sites on the Internet. It is a micro-blog, where messages are broadcast directly to your followers. This is great for brief conversations (the messages are limited to 140 characters) and for commenting on other peoples’ conversation. This is interesting in itself, but many people have been searching for a way to use Twitter to make money.
Can it be done? Yes, it definitely can! Is it hard? Not if you do it properly!
How can I make money on Twitter?
There are a number of ways to monetize Twitter. First, you can use it to build your list of followers and then encourage them to go to a website or blog you have set up. Or, you can include brief links to affiliate pages in the messages (called ‘tweets’) that you send out.
In either case, the secret is to build a large list of followers. This can be done the hard way, searching for people manually and then adding yourself to their list, and hoping that they will reciprocate. Or you can use free software applications to find and add them automatically. Obviously, the second method is preferable!
But before you start to attract followers, you need to set out your stall on Twitter. The most important factor in influencing people to follow you and then to click through to whatever site you want to promote, is firstly to have interesting, informative or intriguing tweets and secondly, to have a profile that encourages further contact.
These two elements will determine how successful you are in making money on Twitter. There are people who have made over $ 2,000 in their first couple of weeks on Twitter, just by paying attention to getting their profiles right. Someone else built up to 16,000 followers in just 90 days! He makes a great income just from working that list (it’s actually up to 23,000 at the time I write this).
How do I get followers?
The traditional way is to search for conversations relating to subjects that are of interest to you, and seeing who is taking part. You can then go to their pages and choose to “follow them”. You can also look at their list of followers and select some of them to add to your list. Hopefully, some of them will then add you to their list of people to follow. As you can see, this process can be a bit involved and can take an appreciable amount of time. The secret to building your list quickly is to automate the process, and there are applications available to do that and, best of all, they’re free!
But what do I send as tweets?
Okay, now you’re building your list, you need to be in touch with the people who subscribe so that you can demonstrate a competency in your chosen subject and attract them to go to your homepage to find out more about you. And that’s one of the times that you have a chance to get them to click on your links. The other opportunity is in the tweets themselves. Although you don’t want to overdo it, you can add a link into your tweets that will lead directly to the web page or blog that you want them to visit. It could be a link to your business site, or it might be for an affiliate program related to the topic that you share in common. Either way, once you encourage them to click on it, you have a chance to convert them.
But now there’s the question of what to write. Well, the answer is easy – there is plenty of content on the internet for whatever subject you choose, and there are ways to automate the collection of that information, to convert it to short tweets, and to send it to your list. The process can be completely automated and will just run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for as long as you wish. And, once again, the programs you need to use are free.
This really can be ‘running a business while you sleep’!
What can I sell to my list?
You may already have a business that you want to promote, whether it is an offline business that you want to drive traffic to, or an online web business. But if you don’t, or if you want to build additional automated revenue streams, you can sign up for an affiliate program and direct traffic there.
Whichever route you choose, if you have a list of a few thousand followers, you can virtually guarantee that some of them are going to sign up for your offers – and with the list growing every day, your income will grow with it! And once you have set it up once; create another Twitter profile and rinse and repeat!
The author has been making money on the Internet for over 10 years – and you can too! Discover how to get 16,000 followers in 90 days! If you want to learn the secrets to building your list of followers fast, on auto-pilot… and then making a living from them – check this out: Making money with Twitter.
