Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

How To Make Money With Twitter

December 25, 2008 | Feature, Social Media

This seems to be a proverbial question. You spend all this time on Twitter, building your follower count. Naturally you want to make some money with those people, right? How do you cash in? And you know what?

Don’t be an idiot!

Sorry if you expected something else. I think a lot of internet marketers are starting to catch on to this. The simple truth of the matter is this: You don’t make money with Twitter directly and you’d be an absolute chump to even try.

Recently, there was some talk about Dell Computers and how they made $1 million using Twitter. They toss out sales alerts on their Twitter account and people would then click through and perhaps buy something. That’s fine, but these people followed Dell knowing full well that sales alerts was what they were signing up for. Twitter was just the medium.

But, most of us are not Dell. If your audience is such where they are eagerly awaiting sales alerts from you, then by all means use Twitter for that. It is a great communications platform.

For the rest of us, tossing straight sales messages over Twitter would be like showing up to your neighbor’s party and immediately hitting them up to buy something from you. It is just plain rude.

Perry Belcher did a great video that sums this up quite nicely. Here it is:

So, here are the bullet points for you:

  • Twitter is about relationships, not direct sales. You can funnel those relationships into potential sales later, but Twitter is about being social.
  • If you throw sales messages out over Twitter, you just might be a chump.

If you are spamming your followers, you’re probably going to lose them (and deservedly so). As an example, I recently stopped subscribing to Chris Pirillo’s RSS feed because all I was getting from him was blog posts about coupon codes. I thought it was completely disrespectful to his audience. I mean, 50+ posts (and hence tweets) containing NO value, ALL coupon codes.

That’s just not how you treat your audience.

So, back to the original question. How do you make money with Twitter? The answer? You don’t. Not directly anyway. Twitter is about building relationships and, hence, your brand. Don’t be a chump.

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  • Here's my take. "Top 10 Ways to Make Living As Witty Writer Who Wears Sweats & Twitters All Day" http://tinyurl.com/83moye
  • Very good point. I actually just started on twitter last week after I saw a spike in traffic since Yaro mentioned my blog in one of his tweets. I haven't fully dived into it yet but I plan on using it to build relationships, which I believe will end up growing my business. Thanks again for the timely post.
  • I would disagree in part with your argument. Indirectly you can make money using twitter. Does spaming people for followers work? No, but legitimately engaging in conversation with individuals can increase your followers.

    Some people, like Chris Prillo, or Guy Kawasaki, hardly ever interact with their followers. It depends are what you are looking for in a follower. For some I use them as an RSS feed so I CAN just read their blog. For others, like Chris was for you, it's annoying.

    Through the use of Twitter I have single handedly quadrupled the traffic to my site. The more visitors you have the better chance you have at selling something. By having well respected followers who have a large network you can leverage them for promotion.

    As you stated gaining relationships is important and should be the concentration of Twitter. Simply using Twitter as a blog feed will not gain you the respect of your peers. Interacting and using Twitter as a feed will help publicize your material which can lead to increased traffic and thus more money.
  • I'm always trying to find ways to make money on the web and I agree that Twitter is not it. People want to be heard on Twitter, not clobbered over the head with sales pitches.

    Sara
  • This was an awesome powerful video! Thanks for posting it and I found you on twitter.

    Lets Party!
  • I totally agree and believe that twitter is a tool that will help you in generating extremely huge amount of revenue in an indirect way. From a marketing point view, Twitter is a very healthy place where any entity can create awareness about its products and position itself in the market!

    For me, my blog is still less than a month old and i believe that i will be using Twitter for lot of stuff that generates revenue at the end-of the day, and of course i will be sharing everything with you guys step by step!

    Thank you David,

    Firas
  • You do a good job augmenting your points, combining video and bullets.

    I really like the mental model of going to a party (social network), then inviting friends to your home (blog).
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