I’ve been using Twitter for a couple of weeks now, and much as I shunned it in the early days I’m quite enjoying it!

Not for the:

“I’ve just got up!”
“I’ve just had a cup of coffee
“I’m bored!”

type Tweets – more the quick fire posts (when I don’t have time to right a full blog post), the chit-chat, and instant notification of people who’s blogs I follow adding a new post. My own posts get notified in my twitter timeline – which has lead to a few followers recently.

Making Money

I sat thinking about it this morning and couldn’t work out if there was any real way to make money from Twitter (never one to miss a trick if it’s possible!), so I went and did a bit of digging (for information not the networking site!).

This search lead me to bookmark a few new feeds in my reader (needless to say I’ll probably end up following these users on Twitter as well!), a lot of what I read was about how Twitter itself can make money – much as they probably need to I’m not going to get anything out of it – so I quickly skipped over those!

Any twitter money making idea seems to revolve around promotion or marketing, and before you can do that you’ve got to have followers (it always makes me smile people listing how many followers they have – like some great leader!):

• Direct Advertisement seems to be the key if you’ve got a lot of followers interested in your niche market and your own product to sell.
• Affiliate Marketing is something I know a little about, it still relies on you having a reasonable amount of followers, but also means you don’t have to promote your own products – you can promote other people’s and take the commission.
• Paid Reviews fall in the same category as Direct Advertisement in my opinion.

All in all this all looks a bit spammy to me, if you start pumping advertisements to your followers their pretty soon going to unfollow (can’t blame them really)…

So, is Twitter really just a networking site (as Uberaffiliate discusses) – with no opportunities to make money at all – or should it be viewed as a gateway to your main site? Any thoughts?

A few companies have sprung up to try to monetise (or monetize), but I’d be interested in hearing the views of existing users of these services:

• TwittAd seems to rely on users visiting the profile pages of users (this comes under the same thing of how difficult it might be to make money from RRS feeds).
• Adjix is an interesting alternative, TinyURL is used by lots of users to people on Twitter to place shortened links in their 140 characters. Adjix does the same thing, but frames the page you want them to visit with an advert! ($0.10 for every 1000 unique views and $0.20 for every valid, unique, click-through – more on this here.

There appear to be a few books around on the subject of how social networking can improve your business, maybe I should read one of these!

All in all, I don’t think there’s a real trick to be had (not often I say that, I know), so I’ll stick to just Tweeting about random stuff! Obviously, f you know different I’d love to hear about it!