part two – monatising twitter: is it possible to make money via affiliate marketing on twitter?

my first proper blog talked about making money via sponsered tweeting, which is an excellent way to make a few dollars per day. However it doesn’t make enough to really change your life – let alone make anything close to a full or part time income.

affiliate marketing on the other hand is a different ballgame entirely. Affiliate marketing involves selling other peoples goods, and taking a cut of the profit. You are paid for acting as a middle man, and therefore introducing a buyer to a seller.

traditionally affiliate marketing is carried out via PPC advertising and links within the affiliates websites. Twitter brings a whole new dimension to affiliate marketing, which can be insanely profitable, however it does have to be done right, and done in a way which doesnt insult the twitter culture.

There are some standout benafits to affiliate marketing on Twitter, from the affiliates standpoint. The most glaring benafit is the fact that you have the potential to build what is affectively a very large opt-in viral email list of people that you can target with relevent adverts. If people are folowing you because you discuss photography, then you have the chance to sell photography related items (actual cameras, camcorders and lenses etc) and/or electronic resources aswell, such as ebook guides. The latter is the target of this blog, because they often offer the affiliate a huge slice of the action – often with commisions of 75 percent.

Twitter, like the affiliate programs is FREE to use for the advertiser, which means that any sales you generate equate to pure, 100 percent profit for you – a major advantage of twitter for sure!

Before we get onto how to actually go about making money from twitter by following this model, I first want to discuss a number of the pitfalls.

Twitter is not short on affiliate marketers, and for the most part, it is not a better place for them. A lot of these so called marketers are going about it entirely wrong. They are inundating people with affiliate links on every single tweet they make, which is a huge turn off. You must always add value to the market place as an affiliate marketer. If every single tweet you make is an affiliate based link, people will unfollow you very fast indeed. However if you can add value to peoples twitter feeds, then you can affiliate market as well.

One way NOT to do it, is to inundate people with direct messages as soon as they follow you. This is a huge turn off, and many people will instantly go and click “unfollow”.

so if you want to give this a go, here is a simple “monatise” twitter business model for you:

Now lets get down to how to get this show on the road. Priority one is to build a significant twitter following on AT LEAST ONE TWITTER ACCOUNT (although we really want at least 5 hugely popular twitter accounts to do this big time!

1) Firstly, sign up to social oomph : http://www.socialoomph.com/90383.html

this is be a great service, as it does a number of nifty tricks. Firstly, it automates tweeting, so it can be set up so that it tweets whatever you want all day. Secondly, it sends all your new followers a direct personal message – which can be a great way to start to build a relationship with your follwers – what you don’t do here however is put an affiliate link into your welcome message, this is a huge “no-no”! This software also clears out peope you follow that don’t folow you back, thus clearing out your system. There is a pro version and a FREE version, go with the free for now, but the pro will be worth it if your really serious about this!

2) obviously the system is quite dependant on having a large follower pool, but there is software out there that can do that for us. One of the best is the following:
http://tinyurl.com/y9st4pg

This softwares number one aim is to build a massive list of follwers, and you can have a number of different twitter accounts. This software is the best in the business and te owners have actually just signed a deal with twiter, so it is the only offical twitter adder!

3) clickbank – the affiliate program.

clickbank doesn’t own the items, it is a digital platform for software developers to sell their downloads. The main benafit is that they pay very good affiliate rates, and you can easily make upwards of 40 dollars per sale. This can even go up and beyond 70 dollars on a really big item. The normal route to market such products is via ads within your website, email etc, or PPC ads on google, bing, yahoo etc etc. The main benafit of twitter, is it is FREE. So it therefore makes a great testing ground for ad campaigns. Of course a very successfull ad campaign on twitter, could be taken to PPC on google, to make even more money. I have used google before for that, and it works, its just it is trial and error normally. BUT with twitter you can find which ads work, and the good ones can go on google. Again, another good point with twitter is that its 140 character tweets are very similiar in size to a google PPC add…

sign up to clickbank here
http://tinyurl.com/ydqv2bs

Then it is a case of building a relationship with your twitter list. This involves communicating with them by using the @PERSONSTWITTERNAME function, and building trust. if 80 percent of your tweets are communication based and 20 percent are ad based, then you will find a more receptive market.

the great thing with this is the fact that the marketing is FREE. So you are gaining sales out of nothing!

long term you can even get paid per tweet (see blog one). This is only possible after you gain a large pool of follwers, but i could for example get paid 1.88 per tweet, even with just 1000 followers. It will be MUCH more when i have 20,000 followers!! people have even been paid 20,000$ for ONE tweet before now. Twitter is part of 21st century marketing, and as such big companies are involved. Now where big companies are, big money follows. They don’t have time to do go about building lists like this, and managing it, but are happy to pay people who will handsomely!!

so thats it – all you need to monatise your twitter account. All i will say is, don’t abuse the system. Do tis right, by striking a balance, and you will make nice money, do it wrong and you will have no followers and no money from twitter!

good luck to you, and as always, any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Getting paid to Tweet – how you and I can make money out of Twitter! part one

Firstly, as this is my first “proper” blog, i would like to take the time to welcome you to this blog. What i am aiming to do with this blog is to show you ways to both make and save money on the internet.

Now i Know that most of you will have found this blog via my twitter link (1money_maker), and as such, it makes sense to discuss ways to monatise twitter.

Twitter as you know, provides a viral interface for updating friends, colleages and anybody else you may [or may not] know on what you have been up to and what you are planning to do, etc.

Perhaps the lure of twitter is it’s inherant simplicity, and thus, that is perhaps why it is associated more with the elder generations then the likes of facebook, myspace and bebo. The latter mentioned social networking sites have more in-depth interaction, which again perhaps, better suits the younger “techie” generations.

I think that is somewhat of a half truth however, and twitters growth (which is easily outstripping that of facebook) provides some evidence to that statement.

what is straightaway evident is that twitter is heavily used by marketeers and businesses in general – which is interesting considering that there are NO formal advertising avenues on twitter. So what are these businesses doing on twitter, which has limited functionaility and no advert avenues?

There are of course a number of reasons why businesses and individuals are using twitter. A huge lure of twitter for many people is the ability to affiliate market to a mass audience at NO cost to the advertiser. This is an interesting opportunity, and will be discussed at length in part 2. What i will say for now is that 99.9 percent of people that are currently affiliate marketing on twitter are doing it wrong, and are thus stealing value from twitter, getting their accounts suspended and ultimately making NO money.

For now however i want to discuss a far easier way to start making money on the internet – and twitter specifically. This was the subject of one of my tweets today. It is sponsered tweeting, and the opportunities for you are fairly large.

Sponsered tweeting involves tweeting on the behalf of a company, usually on a “pay per click (ppc)” model. Think google ads, but you are google, getting paid to present the advert, and making a profit of every click you achieve.

This is an opportunity open to anybody with a twitter account, although your pay per click will be largely determined by the amount of follwers you have. People have (believe it or not) been paid in excess of $20,000 for ONE tweet! This of course will only happen if you have a follwers list running into the hundreds of thousands, but you or I, can command a dollar a tweet if we have in excess of 1000 followers, which isn’t hard to achieve. My 1money_maker account started life 3 days ago with 0 followers, and right now has over 1000 (and climbing fast). If i can do it, you sure can!

with sponsered tweeting, you are provided with a tweet (which can often be modified by you, if you desire) which you then tweet out to your followers. The PPC ranges do differ markedly, but there are a number of good opportunities which hover around $0.05/click. This may not sound much, but clicks can add up fast (certainly when you have a good follower count) and you can make a few dollars a day for nothing!

This is not something that you would want to abuse, as your aim on twitter is to provide value to the people that follow you. This is why i spend large portions of my day looking for interesting and highly relevent information of the internet to tweet out to my folowers, whether it is camera and photography related info for my cameraWhouse twitter followers, or money making/saving for the good people that follow my 1money_maker account, I and you, should always seek to add value. People are never obliged to folow you on twitter, you have to earn your followers, and then work to retain them.

However the moral of the story is you can monatise twitter whilst providing value to your followers. If you succeed in doing this, you add value to twitter, however if you fail, you can end upbeing an affiliate turn off, who gets un-followed more time then he gets followed.

in part two of this blog, i will look at affiliate marketing. There is swathes of cash available to be made down this avenue, but getting it right is key.

We must maintain our principals whilst we aim to make money on the internet, and this bleached white hat mentality will equate to long term profits for everyone.

so if you want to make your first tentitive steps towards making a few extra dollars a day via twitter – ten you have nothing to lose and everything to gain from checking out this website listed below. feel free to leave feedback and i hope this article has helped you somewhat. Look out for part two – coming within the next few days!

follow this link to start making $s for your tweets! http://bit.ly/259Fef

first blog

welcome to my first blog! This is a short and sweet “helo” to all who have popped by. I will be updating this blog as often as possible, with ways for us to save and make money on the internet.

your comments are always welcome, and i hope we can debate out a few points, which can help makes things clearer for everyone.

If you have a topic you would like me to cover, then feel free to make a reccomendation.

In the mean time, feel free to check out my site, www.onlinecamerawarehouse.co.uk if you are after great value retail and wholesale photographic equipment.

You can follow me on twitter, and i will update you there when there is a new blog to be read!

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