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The great thing about Twitter for the time being, is that there is money for everyone.

First, are you a “Twitterer” (start with Making Money Tweeting) or a Business that wants to advertise (start with Buying Cheap Twitter Ads)?  There is the ability to make money for both, you just need to know your channel.

Making Money Tweeting

As a Twitterer or Tweep, you can make money by signing up for Sponsored Tweets or Ad.ly. These exchanges allow businesses to find you and buy and advertisement from you, which is essentially a tweet.

All you have to do is:

1. Sign up on SponsoredTweets.com or Ad.ly (please use “conorneu” as your referrer)
2. Set a proposed price for your ads.  I have mine just over $1.
3. Wait for offers from businesses. I am receiving one every few days.
4. Accept their proposed Tweet, or even write one for them if they allow it.
5. The platform tweet your ad out for you over your Twitter account
6. You get paid

So far, I have been making a few dollars every few days (primarily from Sponsored Tweets), but the pace is increasing rapidly as more and more companies join onto Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly.

Tips

• Of course, you need to make sure your ads are not overwhelming your Twitter account. Nobody will follow or listen to you if you are only tweeting ads. Keep a proper balance.
• Also, choose your keywords carefully.  This is what advertisers use to find you.  If you list too specific of keywords to begin with (“Spanish coin collector”), you may limit the amount of advertisers that find you.  On the other hand, if you are too broad (“usa”), you might end up with ads that are not very relevant to you and your followers interests, which will hurt your advertising potential over time.  I would stick with general locations (“nyc, seattle”) and generic industries (“sports, real estate”) that you often tweet about.
• Your best chance to get higher priced bids is to improve the amount of true followers you have.  I say “true” followers, because if you are just following any random person just to get them to follow you back, they are most likely not going to be watching your tweets.  Over time, the advertisers are going to learn ways to determine the best advertisers.  One way is to look at the follower/following ratio.  Ad.ly has also mentioned they are creating some sort of quality score which will take into account the performance of your ads in relation to the number of followers you have.  In the end, tweet about interesting things and your followers will be worth something to the advertisers.
• Lastly, refer people.  Sponsored Tweets is paying 10% referral fees and Ad.ly is paying 12% for up to two years.  That means, when someone signs up under my referral and then gets paid $1 for a tweet, I get an extra $0.10.  For doing nothing other than spreading the word!

Buying Cheap Twitter Ads

Small businesses are quickly moving their advertising online, and rightly so.  Twitter is just one of an array of tools for finding potential customers.

Tweet ads are beginning to prove cheaper in terms of impressions, cost per click, and other methods of calculation.  It is still in the early days of testing, but Twitter is quickly showing potential as a major platform for online advertising.

Your best solution for buying ads on Twitter as a small business is to run an entire conversion and performance campaign.  Simply buying these Tweet ads and sending them to your home page will not yield you any worthwhile results.  Instead, you need someone to be targeting specific demographics via those tweets and sending them to landing pages that are built to convert that user into a customer.

As a small business, I would suggest letting our company, Neptune Local, manage your campaign.  We specialize in Internet Marketing, so we have the understanding of how this process works, both on Twitter and other platforms.  There are others out there who are testing the waters of advertising on Twitter alongside us, but do not let anyone tell you they are an expert.  This is a new playing field and the only experience people can have come from experience with similar products, such as advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn, both of which we know well.

Tips on Buying Tweet Ads

• Small businesses often need to geo-target their ads.  It does not make much sense for a Dentist in Los Angeles to advertise with a Twitterer who is based in Toronto, as most of his followers are probably also in Toronto.  Search for geo keywords (“Los Angeles, LA, California”) to find your match.
• Test the water before diving in.  While a Twitterer with hundreds of thousands of followers may look like a perfect match, it is also expensive - thousands of dollars - to buy an ad with them.  Try out some $1 ads on the little guys to get the hang of it first.
• Your best potential advertisers are your current customers that are already on Twitter.  You know they like your product, so it makes sense that their peers or followers would like your product as well.  Figure out a way to encourage your customers to sign up for Sponsored Tweets.

A Twitter Advertising Revolution

The guys who run Twitter, @biz and @ev, are extremely sharp.  They understand the potential of Twitter and are going to try as hard as possible to not screw it up.  If they grow it correctly, Twitter will turn into a major exchange of revenue, both with product placements, direct sales, and advertising.

The great thing about Twitter is that everyone can be involved from all sides.  You can be a publisher, a marketer, and advertiser, and a reader.  Choose your niche now and learn while Twitter grows rather than after the fact.

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