99 Ways to Make Money Using Twitter

The challenge in writing and researching a Twitter business book is to look at all the strategies, methods, and ways of making money on Twitter, and to bring them together into a book that is current, yet filled with case studies that will not go out of date. The methods range from one extreme to the other. We found authors who were selling their books with Twitter, and writers who were publishing their books on Twitter. We came across plenty of large firms using Twitter to improve their customer service, and one Twitter entrepreneur who was making almost $1500 a month helping CSS programmers in his spare time on Twitter. We found a bunch of different ways of inserting ads into a Twitter page – some more obtrusive than others – and users who were offering Twitter-based translation services, job listings, garage sales, retail outlets, giveaways, affiliate links, contests, directories, craft products and a whole bunch more.

Some of these methods were making money directly through sales, commissions, payments for services and more. Others acted as a branding tool, community builder or viral marketing channel that spread a company’s name and image further – and cheaper — than it could have done otherwise.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to find that people were experimenting with Twitter in such creative ways and in so many different ways. But we wanted to be certain that these methods worked. It’s easy enough to come up with an idea. But implementing that idea and making sure that it’s as good in practice as it seemed in theory is a whole other ball game. As we researched each method then, we looked closely at how people were implementing it and tried to see what sort of results they were having. When we described that strategy in the book, we made sure that the chapter included at least one case study that would allow readers to see the method’s effectiveness for themselves — and copy it easily.

That ease of implementation was a guiding principle, and it governed the structure of the book. Twitter has turned out to be an incredibly flexible marketing tool, one that’s vital to companies the size of Comcast as much as to individual sellers looking to increase their website views or move a few more handmade items. What all of these users have in common though is that none of them wants to waste time trying to figure out how to make a method work, let alone decide whether it’s going to work at all.

From How It’s Done to Where to Begin In each chapter then, we included an introduction that summarized the strategy we were about to describe. We added a short key that would function as a guide to the method’s difficulty, skill level and revenue potential. We then explained how twitterers were using the method, how anyone can do the same thing, pointed out where to begin, and added some advanced tips to ensure that anyone who used the method could skip from beginner to advanced user — and secure earner — right away. And finally, we made sure that we included a reference to a case study so that readers could look at the example in action for themselves.

Clearly not all of these methods are going to be suitable for every user of twitterer, just as not everyone is going to make money with a blog about gardening or an ebook about collecting porcelain dolls. That’s why it’s so important for people who are serious about using Twitter — and serious about making money online — to understand the breadth of the opportunities available. If you aren’t aware of just what Twitter can do — and what people are doing on the site — then you won’t be able to choose the methods that best suit you.

Among the Twitter documents stolen from the cloud by a French hacker and published recently by Techcrunch was a note with the question “Are we the new Internet?” That’s unlikely. Twitter is just one service which uses the Internet, but it does share the Internet’s flexibility and its earning potential too. Entrepreneurs, businesses, managers and everyone, in fact, needs to understand the range of the opportunity that Twitter offers so that they too can make the most of it – just as they need to understand the Internet if they want to stay in business.