My Make Money With Twitter Experiment
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.
Sponsored Tweets
The other way I began making money via twitter was sponsored tweets.
If you don’t know what sponsored tweets is, I highly recommend you check out my two case studies.
This has been probably the biggest money maker for me on twitter as far as time spent vs revenue.
So far I’ve been able to take 8 opportunities bringing in around $160. Sure it’s not huge, but for the amount of time spent on writing the tweets, I’m happy with it. 
So there you have it. While money can be made on twitter, it’s been a lot of work and at the current moment is a very small portion of business income.
Now go get tweeting! My experience could be very well different from yours and you could end up making a TON of cash.
