So you have been very popular and successful on twitter.. So what next ? If you had a website that was successful, wouldn’t you have started monetizing it with advertisements already? Well, there is already much debate on the whether it is ethical to post advertisements on your personal blog, Twitter account or Facebook page , where the experience and interaction is more personal than of business. This post is not intended to discuss whether it is right or wrong on posting ads on your twitter feed, but to present you the various options that are available, which I found through my social media experiments. This post only cover the ways for direct monetization using sponsored tweets but not any indirect monetization through affiliate marketing or by sending traffic to your websites. By Sponsored Tweets,  I mean,  you sell your tweets to advertisers for a fixed amount of money based on  number of tweets or valid clicks generated.

BuySellAds : BuySellAds is the darling of bloggers and webmasters as the best market place for banner advertisements for their websites.  BSA has recently launched yet another interesting opportunity on their website through sponsored tweets.  If you already have an approved website with BSA, then you can simply add sponsored tweets option to it directly as your property . Otherwise you will need to convince them to accept your twitter account registration.  The minimum amount per tweet is $10 and you can set anything above this.  BSA charges 25 % of your asking rate for every tweet offer.  BSA gives full control in the hands of advertisers and publishers. Advertiser can select twitterers from the list and publisher will decide if he wants to send out that tweet or not.  The  advertisers would be looking at the follower count and the niche in which your account is built around , before offering you the sponsored tweet.  Note that  all the sponsored tweets  on BSA will be forced to include Ad in it as a mandatory disclosure.

Revtwt : Earlier known as  TwtAd,  Revtwt provide both Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Tweet (CPT) offers. The CPC rates are generally higher than compared to SponsoredTweets.com, thereby increasing your revenue generation.  The CPC offers are valid only for clicks from certain countries which the advertiser set.  Once you reach  above $20, you may withdraw the amount via PayPal.

SponsoredTweets.com : SponsoredTweets.com is immensely popular and hence it is also difficult  for the advertisers to actually find you in the sea of twitter publishers. ST recently introduced “Pro accounts” at $1.99 per month, which made it more difficult for the publishers. So unless ST lists you are a celebrity on twitter or web celeb, it has become nearly impossible for you to get  Cost Per Tweet (CPT) offers from ST. Ofcourse, you can still earn some low value Cost Per click (CPT) offers from ST.

You may also check out many other services like Ad.ly , My Likes , Magpie etc

What do you need to remember ?

* At your own risk : Be aware that you are likely to lose many good followers and fans when they see advertisements on your twitter feed.  This  may bring down your online reputation and hence you have to make a difficult choice on whether you really want to go for it.

* Not for everyone :  Please understand that sponsored tweets are not meant for everyone and not everyone will be equally successful in generating enough revenue considering the time you may have to spend for this. This isn’t how to make quick money with Twitter ! This is all about patience and hard work.

* Get more followers : If you have less than 20,000 followers, then practically it is less likely that advertisers will find or choose you.  The more the followers you have, the better are your chances of visibility.  But do understand that you will  also need more of genuine human followers instead of spammers and bots.  Only when there are genuine followers, you are more likely to get valid clicks on your sponsored tweet. So do concentrate on building your twitter brand and thereby increasing your reach.

* Don’t be a spammer:  Once you start getting more sponsors and money out of your tweets,  you are likely to get more tempted to go the spammers way in order to make faster money. Do stick on to the quality of content and interaction with other twitter users  and make sure that you don’t annoy your followers by endorsing crap products or tweeting ads very frequently.

* Don’t attempt fraud:  Be honest in your business.  Don’t try any methods of click frauds, by clicking on your own CPC tweets or asking others to click them explicitly.  Don’t employ any automated methods to increase your clicks. These are easily detected by these vendors and you may get permanently banned and money earned till then be seized automatically.

* Keep the 80:20 ratio :  Don’t let your sponsored tweets be more than 20 percent of your total tweets.  Continue to tweet quality content and maintain good interaction and engagement with your followers.

* Twitter doesn’t like it : Be also aware that  Twitter officially doesn’t like its users generating revenue using their infrastructure and bandwidth for free. You may also read my previous post on this.

* Check what you tweet : Always carefully check the destination link of the advertisements before you decide to tweet it.  Don’t accept offers that may not much add value to your followers or degrades your reputation on twitter and social media. You may not have to tweet every CPC advertisement that you see.

* Declare your conflict of interest : I make sure that any sponsored tweet from my twitter feed will carry an #Ad or similar indication.  Your followers should be aware that the particular tweet is sponsored or paid and we should leave it to them whether or not they should click on the Advt links.

There may be many more such services around, but it is also important that you don’t get distracted with any low paying services or opting to sign-up for every one of them. Only use those services that you can make both your followers happy and also earn good cash.  So make sure you get the best value to your twitter account and time for yourself and your followers.

Note :  You may be surprised to know that many power twitter users actually make money out of their tweets,  but it is up to them whether they want to disclose it or not.  But personally I see that it is imperative that my twitter audience knows what I do.  Honestly this has to do with my social media experiments than making extra money. Thank you for the understanding.