How to Make Money with Twitter

It’s really hard to make money doing something new if you have no experience with it. If a friend invites you over, and shows you his operation, and you see with your own eyes that it is profitable, that builds confidence. There’s untold billions of dollars made in internet marketing — however, if you have no experience with a particular strategy — it’s still hard to believe that you can make a profit with it.

I’m tackling a new niche. I have experience with Twitter, but for this particular niche I’m starting from scratch. As such, I’m going to build a following of hundreds of thousands of followers, but as of yet I have none. You can watch me build a targeted list of Twitter users, and join along in the fun if you want.

Everything I do for this project, I’m going to jot it down for all to read. I think it will build your confidence to see a functioning, real-world example of a profitable Twitter operation. I’ll explain how I’m monetizing this project, give you daily updates on how many new twitter followers I have, and let you know of any bumps I experience along the way.

I’m going to be using the Twitter API. Don’t let that scare you off, it’s very easy. I’m going to show you how to do it. I’ll give you my source code. I’ll explain how to implement exactly what I’m doing. You may have to learn a few new skills, but I’m a good teacher and will get you up to speed.

Let’s talk about monetization. I titled this article “How to Make Money with Twitter”. Some people mistakenly start building a website or headed down a path of developing a project without first strategizing how to make money doing it. It’s also a good idea to figure out why you want to do this with Twitter — seeing there are many methods of making money online with internet marketing and SEO.

I’ll explain why making money with Twitter interests me. Google is fickle. If you’ve watched the direction Google is headed lately — things like Google Ventures, where Google is essentially creating or buying up content publishers and green-lighting them to rank extremely well, it gives you a vision of the future of SEO. That future involves Google scarfing up every profitable niche and monopolizing the SERPs in order to send all searchers to their own sites. As such, it makes sense to add projects to your online portfolio that do not depend on traffic from Google. That way, when Google finally eats your lunch, and demotes your rankings in order to make way for sites they own to rank, you’ll still be making money online!

Here is how I plan on monetizing Twitter.

1. My niche is health related. Forgive me if I keep the specific details of the niche secret — every SEO should keep their exact niche to themselves. However, I will say that it is health related and large enough of a niche to find millions of targeted Twitter followers.
2. I have a website in this niche. My plan is to direct people on Twitter to my website.
3. I will monetize the traffic through adsense.
4. I feature Amazon products on the website.
5. Some topics are monetized by clickbank.
6. I expect the social signals I receive to help the site to receive traffic from Google.
7. Once I have many followers, I will trade shout-out’s and promotion to my following, in exchange for backlinks to my website (which should help gain even more traffic from Google).

As I previously mentioned, it is good to come up with ideas for making money that doesn’t include traffic from Google. Yes, I’m hoping for some Google traffic — but the project should hopefully be able to stand on its own, without it.

You should give careful thought to the niche you choose, before we get started. Here are some issues you’ll want to consider.

• Can you find leaders in your niche that have hundreds of thousands of followers? The idea is that we’re going to take all the people who follow leaders in your niche, and follow them (with the hope that they follow us back). For this to be effective, you’ll need to make certain you can find leaders in your niche with many followers. If there are Amazon products or clickbank products that easily fit their needs, that should be a great niche. If you’re relying strictly on adsense — you’re leaving a bunch of money on the table.
• Is your niche profitable? You need to be able to sell things to your followers. There should be products or services that clearly and concisely fit the needs of your targeted followers.
• There are other methods of monetization. You don’t have to copy my exact plan. For instance, you could do fans of Lady Gaga, and then promote tickets when she’s touring. Some people sell tweets, which you could do instead of trading them for whitehat SEO links as I plan. If you think outside the box, you can come up with many more ways to make money with Twitter.

Though I haven’t started getting followers in this niche yet, I have laid some foundation already. In the last month, I’ve created 80 articles for my website, many of which I’ve split into two or three pages, so I already have content to tweet to my followers when the time comes.

Also, as I’ve done this in other niches already, I have developed software for posting to Twitter, building lists of people to follow and every other tool I’ll need to get the job done. As I go, I’ll show you how to do the same. I’ll show you how to do exactly what I’m doing — yet if you find it to be more than you care to learn, there are software tools such as Followliker, which will let you build up accounts. Followliker has its own learning curve, and many limitations. It is a very manual operation to work with Followliker, and you will have to be extremely hands-on in order to keep it functioning properly. My point is that running Followliker may not be easier than working with the Twitter API (at least it isn’t for me), so keep that in mind if you’re thinking you want the easiest route.

The next article in this series will show you how to start building the list of people to follow, in order to get an extremely targeted list.