Twitter is one of the most popular mediums for online conversations. Twitter is a great social network for you to interact with friends, families, and even celebrities. It can also be a place for you to earn a little extra cash, as long as you have a large following.
Here’s how to make money from Twitter.
Create a Large Group of Twitter Followers
If you’re interested in using Twitter to earn a little extra cash you first need to work on building a loyal following. In the beginning this can be a little tough, but after it’s done you get to reap all of the rewards. If you’re clueless as to how to do this it’s time to brush up on your Twitter skills.
Step#1 Create Your Brand
To effectively make money from Twitter you need to be communicating to a specific audience. That’s why it’s important to develop your brand from the get go.
Here are a couple questions to ask yourself in regards to your Twitter brand:
- Are you promoting a business?
- Are you selling a product or service?
- What are your interests?
If you are selling a product, service, or promoting a business then the topic of your business will be your brand. You’re going to want to find a group of followers who are most likely to do business with you or partner with you.
If you don’t have a business, service, or product to promote then your brand should be something that interests you.
Step # 2 – Create a Strong Profile
When you are setting up your profile it’s important to use keywords in your bio. This way people who are interested in what you have to offer will easily be able to find you when they search for certain keywords. Example: You’re a personal freelance writer, you should have the term “personal finance freelance writer” in your profile description so that you’re found in a search.
You should also use a Twitter name that is relevant to your brand. Don’t forget to add links back to your blog or website if applicable.
Step # 3 – Follow a Bunch of Other People
Now that you have your profile set up it’s time to find you some followers. One of the quickest ways to do this is by following others. You’d be surprised at how many people will follow you back just because you followed them.
To do this find a person with a similar brand as yours with a large following. Start following their followers. You can do this with a few different profiles until you’ve reached the number of followers you like.
Do keep in mind that you can’t follow more than 1,000 people per day.
Step # 4 – Unfollow Some People
Now that you’ve built your followers up it’s time to unfollow some people. You can use a service like Tweepi that makes this a bit easier.
Tweepi will display a list of people who don’t follow you back, users that have been inactive for several days or weeks, and mutual followers. Go through your list and unfollow anyone who didn’t follow you back or anyone who hasn’t been active on Twitter for weeks. You may even want to unfollow some of the people who followed you back. This way your following to followers ratio is low.
People naturally begin to follow you when you have large number of followers but a low number of people you are following. They will automatically assume that you have something important to say.
From here your followers will begin to grow naturally.
Step # 5 – Be Interesting
Congratulations you have now built a large following on Twitter. Now you need to keep that following engaged. You can do this by sharing relevant information pertinent to your brand and actively engaging in conversations with others.
Make Money from Twitter
If you’ve made it this far you have a pretty good chance at using Twitter to earn some extra cash. Here are three ways you can make extra money from the large following you just created.
Tweet Sponsored Posts
Many companies will pay Twitter power users to tweet advertisements. There’s just one catch – you must have a very large following.
If this is something that interests you you’ll have to build up your Twitter followers and create some engagement. After you’ve built a solid following you can sign up with companies like ad.ly or twitpub.com to find interested advertisers.
Advertisers generally want to advertise to specific audiences. If you’re a mom you could build a strong following of other moms, if you’re a football fan you should build a strong following of other football fans, etc.
Promote Your Products
If you have your own business or sell items on eBay or Etsy, Twitter is the perfect tool for promoting those items. It’s best to concentrate on building a strong following of people who would be interested in your item first. After that you could tweet a product that is on sale, an auction that is ending soon, or a new item you’ve added to your collection.
Sell Your Services
As a freelance writer I often hit up Twitter in search of new clients. I simply tweet my “hire me” page and add a sentence such as “Looking for a #freelancewriter? Hire me!”
You can do this for practically any business or service. It’s important to make sure that you have the followers that’ll take notice beforehand.
If you are interested in earning extra money from Twitter or just increasing your following, these steps will take you there.
Have you made money by using Twitter? Tips for building a large following? Let me know in the comments!
I wrote a post on this very topic! I have made probably $300 or so over the past few years on Twitter, mainly via sponsored tweets. What I would really like to do is refer more people to sponsored tweets so I can get the 10% cut (for life) that they offer you for referrals. It’s not much, but over time it can really build up.
Wow. I had no idea that they gave you the 10% on referrals but that’s a great idea. If you get enough referrals you could make a good bit!
These are great, Alexa! I haven’t used Twitter in this way….but why not?
Hey Alexa and thanks for a very comprehensive look at how to bring in some extra cash using Twitter 🙂
I have not been a fan of that particular social media format but maybe I should revisit it a later date!
Thanks again for the post and take care. All the best.
Lyle
I used to hate it! It really took some time for Twitter to grow on me but the more I played around with it the more I liked it!
Great tips! I would definitely love to build up my twitter following. Going to go follow some more people right now…. 🙂
I probably don’t use Twitter to my advantage as much as I should. Great ideas.
I’d never considered using Twitter as a money making venture, but then I don’t even know how to make Facebook work…
Wow, very interesting. So what is considered a large following where they may ask you to tweet ads? I’m trying to build up my following, but I didn’t want to follow too many people who I don’t even know just to build up followers. Plus, I don’t want a bad follower to following ratio. Tweepi sounds pretty useful in the future though.
I would look at DC’s profile. He has 50,000+ followers which was a big undertaking I’m sure but def. doable. @DavidCarlson1
Very insightful, thanks for putting this together. I never considered putting keywords in my Twitter profile. I guess I didn’t realize anything other than your Twitter title was searchable. I have some work to do.
I’m not really using Twitter at its full capacity and my following is pretty low. Making money with it is certainly something I’d like to do, but also something I never think will happen. But for me, spreading the word about my latest articles and following a few interesting people is really what matters the most with Twitter.
I’ve seen the ads come up in my twitter feed a lot more recently. I’m not sure what to think of that. I haven’t spent much time trying to inflate my number of followers. I guess I’ve felt like followers you get just because you followed them probably won’t be all that engaged. I’d rather get followers who actively seek me out.
That’s a good point.
I never even knew you can really make money from Twitter. Cool article.
Very interesting! I’ve never made any money from Twitter, but it would be nice to be able to do so some day 🙂
I’m sure I don’t use twitter to all it’s advantages so thanks for the tips!
Thanks for this information about Twitter I didn’t know that you can earn by using it. What I love of twitter reading some quotes, news and lifestyle from different people around the world.
Great tips! I need to build up a better following for sure and I like the idea of using keywords in my profile. Makes sense.
Tweepi is excellent. I got a lot more followers by using that (and your advice on my blog post about how I don’t have enough followers!). I didn’t think of using Twitter for job hunting, though. That’s a good idea.
I signed up for twitter a few months ago and I’ve slowly been gaining followers, but I didn’t really know how it worked. I did guess that people would follow something with a lot if followers. It just makes sense.
I don’t think that I would do this, but how many followers do you think folks need to have before they would get paid to tweet posts?
I haven’t personally signed up for the sponsored Tweets because I know my following is too low. I use Twitter to tweet my hire me page more than anything. I’d say probably about 50k to actually make anything, but then again that’s just a guess.
Thanks for the tips! I’ve just joined twitter for my blog, and am trying not to use any of my past success or even my real-life friends to grow my little site. I’m going to try these tips and hope they work for me, too!
This was helpful Alexa. I’ll admit gaining a large following on Twitter has been difficult for me. Being a part time blogger affords me less time to interact in that venue.
As a follow up…just checked out Tweepi’s site. Very interesting. I currently have 467 people I follow that don’t follow me back. Scanning the list I know that at one point many of them were following me. Guess the practice of following, then un-following is more common than I thought.
I just started getting into my twitter but I was not sure where to start this gave me a great road map
If some one wishes to be updated with newest technologies therefore he must be
visit this site and be up to date daily.
Amazing quite a lot of fantastic facts.
Many thanks. Ample forum posts.
Hi there Deɑr, arе you actually visiting thiѕ web page reɡularly, iif so after that youu
ѡill definitely ontain nice experience.
So, next time you search for some money making site online, contemplate any of those and
even think of some dependable causes they’re paying you and you will get the most genuine ways out.
I’read the report, it was a great one, i’ll be checking back!