By Richard J. Smith
Twitter has become a popular social networking forum since its launch in 2006. Its rapid growth in recent years made it also a great marketing tool for business owners. Once people realize that Twitter is more than just a way to stay in contact with friends and family, they start to look for ways to make profit. Most profit comes from additional website traffic generated by Twitter that leads to increased sales for products or services.
If you want to be a part of this income generating network, all you need to do is
1. Sign up for a free account with Twitter and
2. Build a huge Twitter follower list.
In order to add followers on Twitter, you can use a paid software or just do this process manually from your Twitter account. If you spend 10 minutes every day on adding friends, you can achieve about 250 followers a week or 1000 followers a month. Just find a person that tweets related to your business and go to his/her followers list.
Then start clicking on the "follow this person" button and try to add all these people one by one. You will notice that at least 1 out of every 10 people you follow will follow you back. If you can add 200 people within ten minutes, you will have at least 20 followers by the end of the day. Now you can start tweeting. Twitter is a great way to market yourself and your business online. However, avoid some common mistakes that most marketers make:
- Make sure your messages do not appear as spam even though they will be. Use your common sense and make them look like they are written by a human, not a machine.
- Do not promote your business in your tweets all the time. Tweet some personal messages, quotes or holiday messages once in a while.
- Do not tweet the same messages over and over again.
- Limit the number of daily tweets to a maximum of 10 tweets a day. Otherwise it will be considered spam.
- Do not send any offensive messages. Keep in mind that your tweets are being received by people from all over the world.
I personally think that the best way to make money with Twitter is to use it for building your trust factor and attracting visitors to your website. Twitter is popular because it's all about the people, not brands. That's why I recommend not attempting any direct money-making methods from it.
Making money on Twitter, just like making money on blogging, is not easy. However, after spending some time and patience, you will see an increase in your website traffic. If you are using advanced tracking systems like Google Analytics, you can even see the traffic coming directly from your Twitter account. If you are not satisfied with the income generated from your additional traffic and looking for other ways to make money, here are some more ideas:
1. Affiliate Marketing
Sign up for an affiliate account with Paydotcom and search for a product that you want to sell to your Twitter followers. You can choose to tweet manually or use automated tweeter programs to promote your new products. Some of your followers will click on your links and buy the product which will make you earn a commission.
2. Try Magpie
Magpie matches the advertisers with the twitter users who are willing to display ads on their tweets. Sign up for an account at Magpie and let them insert ads into your tweets. You get paid a small amount every time Magpie tweets the ad out on your account.
3. Use your background as Ad space
If you have thousands of followers, you can use your twitter background image as an excellent ad space. You may not easily find advertisers but yet it is worth to give it a shot. Good Luck!
To learn more about investment opportunities, financing options and making money online [http://www.therichblog.com/], please visit The Rich Blog [http://www.therichblog.com/]. Here, you will learn about many new ideas to earn money online.