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.
