How To Make Money Online » twitter

Twitter Accounts of Interviewed Affiliates

Jonathan Volk — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:00:17 +0000

If you’re a regular reader, you are of course familiar with the affiliate interviews we’ve been posting since December. There is a well kept archive and we decided to go back through it and grab the Twitter accounts for all these guys (still haven’t gotten even one interview from a female affiliate! Darn you Turbolapp for denying my interview requests!) and made a list. Of the 54 interviews thus far, we’ve located 51 Twitter accounts. Check it out:

Ryan Eagle

Super Affiliate Twins

You can also follow this list, which includes all of the above accounts.

This post and the Twitter list will continue to be updated over time. Additionally, one of the final questions in future interviews will be asking whether the interviewee has a Twitter account so that you can choose to follow them if you liked the content of the interview.

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Original Post: Twitter Accounts of Interviewed Affiliates

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Tweetup Theme

Jonathan Volk — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 20:45:55 +0000

Today Shoemoney launched a new theme today to help you host tweetups.

First… What is a tweetup?

According to my favorite definition from UrbanDictionary… a tweetup is:

A gathering of nerds attempting social contact, likely for the first time. Usually disintegrates into everyone running to the nearest computer to type to one another.
Tommy: Hey Jethro, quit playing WoW its time to meet some folks at the tweetup!

Jethro: Oh yeah I forgot about that, I can’t wait to meet BigBootay421 at the tweetup, but first I need to slay this orc!

Haha! Here is another, less funny variation:

An organized or impromptu gathering of people that use Twitter. (A meet up of people that ‘tweet’ using Twitter.)

Are you going to the “tweetup” tonight?

Tweetups are becoming more and more popular these days. Until now, there has been no real GOOD way to host a tweetup besides some methods like using meetup.com.

The downside to meetup.com is that you have to pay $250 bucks a year to use it… and it was not really designed just for tweetups.

Just today the Shoemoney group launched Tweetup Theme. This is a simple wordpress theme that you can install extremely easily.

Once installed, it allows you to host your own Tweetups extremely easily.

If you’re looking to start hosting tweetups, tweetup theme looks like a great way to do it.

The cost of the theme is $49 for the standard and $249 for the deluxe version. The $49 will get you the script, the deluxe will get you the script with a 5 year domain, 5 years of hosting, and a custom design and installation. Sweet! What a deal!

The best part about all of it is that all the proceeds will be going to charity. Jeremy is awesome in that he raised over $30,000 last year for charity and continues to top himself each year with the amount that he gives. Pretty awesome!

Go check out Tweetup Theme!

Original Post: Tweetup Theme

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How To: Marketing To Twitter Users – Use Video

Jonathan Volk — Thu, 27 May 2010 17:00:13 +0000

Twitter is one website that just really has not been a huge focus for many in terms of marketing. It’s understandable… Conversion rates coming from twitter traffic makes other traffic sources seem like super hero status in comparison.

It’s especially bad if you’re a direct response marketer – like many of you (myself included). Well finally… it’s been discovered that Twitter is actually the BEST at something… Getting users to watch video. (Yay, you can feel a little better twitter!)

A recent article on Mashable showed how Twitter is emerging as the online video power broker.

Essentially, the top referrer for most video sites is twitter… Not only that, when users are referred to a video from Twitter, they are more likely to watch it for a longer period of time.

Take a look at these charts [courtesy of Mashable]:

So what does this mean for you?
First, if you’re advertising to people on twitter, they’re probably used to the world of 140 characters. And… twitter is comprised of the more tech savy people.

All that to say, if you’re not using video on your landing page when promoting an offer or advertising on twitter, you’re probably missing out big time!

And, if you can fit that message into a two minute video… even better!

JUST the other day I saw @JacobSeaGall (VP of Marketing for my company) tweeted out a sponsored tweet CPC campaign from Lunchables that linked directly to a youtube video.

At first I was like… Dang… What a nice gig. Get paid for linking to a youtube video. Now that I know a bit more about twitter… you have to smile. Good move lunchables!

[ Getting the pizza lunchables in my lunch when I was a kid literally defined a great day for me. Now I realize... It was some flat bread with cold tomato sauce and cheese... but it didn't matter, they were awesome. ]

Conformity…
When you advertise on a traffic source such as twitter, it’s important to adapt your marketing methods to the way that will be best received by those users.

Here is a perfect case study example of how Shoemoney DOMINATED Digg years ago by changing his page up to better suit the traffic coming from digg.

Really interesting stuff…

Original Post: How To: Marketing To Twitter Users – Use Video

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Pay Per CLICK For Sponsored Tweets

Jonathan Volk — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:02:40 +0000

Sponsored Tweets has been the main player of sponsored twitter activity for a while now.

The way it works is sort of how any banner advertising works. You pay a set price with no guarantee of any clicks. In twitter’s case, you pay a set price for someone to tweet a message with no guarantee of any return.

This traditionally is a direct response marketers nightmare… or dream. If you can get an ad that is creative enough, you can end up paying just pennies per click for an ad that you would have to pay way more if it were using the pay per click model. But… this is rare.

The main reason why it’s a nightmare is because one day might bring great profits and the next day might bring… a complete loss.

With the pay per CLICK model, you’re guaranteed 1 visitor for a set price. This helps direct response advertisers (AKA affiliates, small business owners, and everyone except BRANDING advertisers) build in exactly how much profit they will make. For example, If you earn on average $0.15 cents per visitor, you know you can pay up to $0.14 cents and still make a profit.

So… It seems like now SponsoredTweets has released a new way for you to pay for CLICKS instead of tweets. Just imagine the huge possibility this opens up for advertisers!

Check it out:

As you can see, the number of opportunities are still pretty low, but this opens a whole new realm of opportunity for advertisers and tweeters alike.

Now that you guarantee a click price, tweeters only get paid when users respond to their ad. This means they have a vested interest in both having a quality following and writing a compelling ad copy.

Before, it didn’t matter if you were “Mr.Spam Account” charging $10 for your 50,000 followers (which would result in $2.00 CPC’s…).

I think it would increase the number of advertisers and tweeters! What do you think?

How do you think this will affect affiliate marketing? New Traffic source for affiliates? I smell a case study brewing.

Original Post: Pay Per CLICK For Sponsored Tweets

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Something Fishy Goin’ On Here… Paid Twitter Followers.

Jonathan Volk — Sat, 15 May 2010 12:00:35 +0000

The other week I made a post about Paid twitter followers.

In the post I outline a few methods I have used to essentially pay for twitter followers and how much it has cost me per follower. With the methods like paying twittercounter.com, for example, you know exactly where your twitter followers are coming from.

Recently my follower count has been increasing steadily (and fairly rapidly) without me paying for any more services.

I’ve received a few @ messages before saying the person didn’t follow me and they were unsure how they did. I usually brushed it off as a… how can I put it lightly… computer illiterate person.

I think however that one of the services I used is using some sort of application access to automatically make users follow those who pay for the service.

The only problem is, I’m not sure which service is doing it… or if it’s just someone trying to get my account banned.

Since I have no way of know knowing… I have no way of stopping it.

Kinda crazy. Either way, be careful buying followers unless you know explicitly where the users are coming from!

EDIT: According to Status.Twitter.com, there WAS a follow bug that they have found but it was supposed to have been fixed. I’ve since seen 4,000+ people follow me. My thoughts are that maybe a paid service or something is using this bug to inflate my count in an attempt to get me banned? I have no idea.

Original Post: Something Fishy Goin’ On Here… Paid Twitter Followers.

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The Twitter Local Lead Gen Machine

Jonathan Volk — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:00:50 +0000

This is a guest post by Adhustler. If you are not following his blog, you should be! His posts always contain EPIC internet marketing related information… sorta like this post below.

Lately you hear a lot of buzz about local online marketing (example). Most of it’s because people think it’s a simple and quick way to make a buck. I don’t agree. I’ve been in the local online marketing space well over 5 years and it can be quite a daunting task working with local clients. I always like to preface any local online marketing post with that disclaimer.

Most of what you hear affiliates doing is your typical traffic arbitrage. They are buying local ppc, setting up a landing page and trying to sell leads for more then they are paying for them. We all know the concept. I have another concept to propose to you that you can in addition to ppc arbitrage or on it’s own and it can make you a lot of money. It’s highly profitable since it doesn’t have much expense attached to it. At this point your probably yelling at the screen, “Tell me Ad Hustler, What Is It?” I like to call the concept “The Twitter Local Lead Gen Machine.”

The concept is that you use Twitter in an intelligent and calculated way to generate local leads for local businesses. Let’s use a fictitious NYC based computer repair service to serve as an example of how this concept works.

1) Get a twitter account and name it something like “nycPC” or whatever works with your niche. I would include a location and keyword related to the local business. I would not name the twitter account using the businesses name. The reason for this is that if your deal falls through with the original client you can always sell your services to a new client in the same niche/area.

2) Set up the info box on Twitter with a tracking phone number and link to a landing page. You can also make a custom twitter background with this information.

3) Get an account at TwitterFeed and set it up to feed the twitter account on a regular basis with PC repair, virus, spyware etc related news. If you can find articles that have tips for protecting your PC that would be even better. – Also throw some tweets up of your own so it doesn’t seem like it’s all automated.

4) Start finding followers. There are several marketing tools that will allow you to follow people based on different factors. You want software that can do 2 things. 1) Follow a tweeters followers &
2) follow geographically targeted tweets containing a particular keyword.

To find LOCAL followers you are going to need a tool that can handle both of those functions. I find that the best way to find local followers is to either follow a local tweeters followers (think a local newspaper) or search for related keywords in a local area.

When your following based on keyword be smart about the keywords you choose. For instance with this account searching for keywords like “computer broken” is going to yield much more targeted followers then just “pc”.

5) Use a service that offers recurring or scheduled tweets. Schedule tweets to go off at least once per day with some sort of promotional message containing the tracking phone number and a link to the landing page.

Over time you may find that these Twitter accounts develop a rather large following. Best of all this whole concept can be put onto autopilot. You just created your own local source of targeted traffic. Leverage that traffic into lead generation & profit.

This post has been brought to you by Ad Hustler / If you liked this post Subscribe To Ad Hustler (I highly recommend it!)

Check out the entire Local Online Advertising Series

Original Post: The Twitter Local Lead Gen Machine

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Twitter Traffic is NOT worth $20 CPM

Jonathan Volk — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 11:00:54 +0000

So from what I am hearing, Twitter is trying to eek out a $20 CPM* from it’s advertisers. That means $20 per 1000 people who see the tweet.

Having spent thousands of dollars on twitter traffic, there is one thing I can tell you for 100% certain: Twitter traffic really isn’t that great for direct response advertisers, especially at a $20 CPM.

It’s sort of like Facebook’s traffic… A megaton of it… but it generally converts less that other sources (like a search engine for example). But… Facebook understands this and charges somewhere in the 30-50 CENTS per 1000 impressions. Yea, you heard me right, 30-50 cents per cpm. Right where it’s able to be profitable.

Guess what? Facebook is profitable because of it.

Can you believe the difference? It’s insane.

Even if twitter was to release a self serve platform like I wrote about previously, at a $20 CPM, no direct response marketer would be able to make it work unless they were advertising something 5x more scammy than those Acai offers.

For now, you’re better off buying twitter followers, paying for sponsored tweets (don’t worry ST, your business is not going anywhere), or just ignoring twitter as a traffic source all together.

Once Twitters venture capitalists realize that a site needs to eventually turn a profit (otherwise it’s useless), maybe they’ll release a system that can actually cater to the direct response industry.

Anyways… Onto the next traffic source for now.

* – $20 CPM info.
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Original Post: Twitter Traffic is NOT worth $20 CPM

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Get 25,000 Twitter followers with Twitter Followers for Sale

Jonathan Volk — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 11:00:39 +0000

[Please ALSO read the updated post on this]

The other day Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker, told me about a recently made a Twitter service called Followers for Sale. It’s a very straightforward process and it works!

They sell any amount of twitter followers from 1,000 to 25,000 starting at $250 for 1,000 followers and $2,500 for 25,000 followers. That’s right… guaranteed twitter followers.

I am ALL about twitter (you should follow me by the way) so I tested this service out and ordered 1,000 followers.

I chose to have them added very slowly so as to not raise any red flags on my account.

After completing a simple and secure PayPal payment, I waited for the results.

On April 8th, I took these screenshots from my twitter account and twittercounter.com:

After 4 days, here are my twitter counter stats:

You can see that before ordering this service, I had a negative trend in followers… After ordering I gained the followers that I paid for pretty quickly!

And another screenshot 2 days later.

Now the main (and obvious) question I have are, who are these followers? Are they real or just some bot accounts?

After talking with some people, apparently the followers are indeed real people, real twitter accounts, etc. The way I understand the service to work is that these real people are paid a small fee to follow these people. It seems like a great way to increase your twitter following and as a result increase your sponsored tweets price, etc.

Awesome service!

Looks like you get a pretty hefty discount when you by in bulk!
- $250 / 1000 followers = $0.25 per follower.
- $1000 / 25,000 followers = $0.10 per follower.

This service is awesome, very affordable compared to other paid services, and is a very effective method to get a TON of followers fast.

Comparing to other paid services

But is $0.25 expensive in comparison to other services where you pay to? Let’s look at twittercounter.com‘s featured user option.

You pay around $459 dollars to be listed on twittercounter.com and from that you can expect around 1000 followers according to their stats. $459 / 1000 followers avg = $0.46! I’ve done this featured user option before and received around 1500 followers.
So at best…

$459 / 1500 followers = ~$0.31 per follower.

Being in the cost per action business, I like the whole “no risk” advertising models where you get exactly what you pay for. Twitter followers for sale is perfect for that!

Original Post: Get 25,000 Twitter followers with Twitter Followers for Sale

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Get Ready To Make HUGE Profits… Twitter’s Advertising System

Jonathan Volk — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 17:34:19 +0000

When Facebook first launched their advertising platform, people made HUGE profit. Like… 5 figures per day profit.

Now twitter is launching their advertising system and those who jump on it first are sure to make some crazy profits!

The main problem right now is that this advertising platform seems to be only for big brands. No self serve platform to know of as of yet… but keep an eye out for it!

Here are some key points from the articles about how the twitter advertising will be delivered:

Here are the details outlined in the articles:

As we previously described, the new system serves up ads based on keywords in Twitter search queries.

Promoted Tweets will appear at the top of the search results page, with small text indicating they were sponsored. The Times piece notes that companies could use this to combat negative tweets (they can place a positive tweet at the top of the page)

A Promoted Tweet isn’t guaranteed to stay afloat for a long time — if the tweet isn’t tracking well in terms of replies, clicks, and a number of other metrics Twitter is calling “resonance”, it will be pulled, and the advertiser won’t pay for it.

One ad will be shown at a time

Initial ad partners include Best Buy, Virgin America, Starbucks, and Bravo

Advertisers will be paying on a CPM basis initially, with plans to adjust the model once Twitter can better gauge how people are engaging with Promoted Tweets

So get ready… And remember, as soon as a self serve platform is launched, the faster you get on it, the better the chances you make some quick and easy money!

Till then…

More News Articles On the Subject:

Image via Adage

Original Post: Get Ready To Make HUGE Profits… Twitter’s Advertising System

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My Make Money With Twitter Experiment

Jonathan Volk — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:58:09 +0000

So at the start of quarter 4 last year (2009), I decided to run a little experiment on twitter. I wanted to see if I could make some money with twitter.

So I first realized that I needed followers. If you have no followers (or few of them), the options become limited as far as making any money on twitter. Sure there is tweet spamming people, but I like my account and don’t want it to get banned.

I started following as many internet marketing people as possible on my twitter in the hopes that they would follow me back. After paying for some tweets and following a ton of people, I got up to over 10,000 followers. (Now I’m at 17,000 followers).

Ok great. So now I have some followers… let’s try to monetize them.

My Amazon Experiment

The first though I had was to use the most non-spammy way to marketing on twitter. Mention an awesome product on amazon and slap in your affiliate link. Sounds easy enough right?

So what I started doing is I had both my wife and partner Jacob find some awesome products that I could tweet about. We got a huge list of products and setup the affiliate links into bit.ly.

Great. So after that we signed up for Social Oomph and began setting up “future tweets.” This way we could have my twitter account automatically send out tweets every 48 hours. The thought behind the 48 hours was that I thought that amazon’s cookie length was 48 hours. But it actually turned out to be 24 hours.

So now we had tweets going out every other day and clicks began to roll in.

When it came time for the Christmas / Holiday season, we began tweeting out every 24 hours.

So after tweeting like crazy, what did we end up making?

Yup. That’s it. Certainly nothing to write home about.

So, technically I would consider this experiment a failure… Sure it might make someone around $600 bucks a year if they did it year round, but that’s just too much work for that amount in my opinion.