Obviously you cannot add Adsense adverts to your Tweets, which are always a good earner. But, there are three other approaches.

Affiliates
On occasion, maybe mention a suitable ebook or whatever (remember that you could be aiming at an international audience). Use an affiliate link, you just have to watch what you link to as Twitter will check the link and refuse them if they look spammy / dangerous!

Promote your website
Offer people something and get them onto your website and let that create the income. Maybe through Adsense, or the product that you are promoting. More a traffic driving tool to the actual point of income, but if it wasn’t for Twitter you wouldn’t be seeing the traffic, so I count it as monetising Twitter.

Sponsored Tweeting
There are various systems you can use whereby you are paid to name drop an advertiser. Some pay by clicks that you produce (hence having genuine followers is essential) whereas others just pay per Tweet. But these will assess your account on terms of how many follower you have; how many mentions you get from other Tweeters; how many links you have in recent Tweets and other questions. In short, they pay more for quality Tweeters.

                          

So, what’s the alternative way? Well there is something else that you can try and it not only finds a better quality of follower, but it also gives your account a better standing if you want to turn it into a cash earning system. And that is to get involved.

There are several types of Twitter user – there’s the ‘engager’, with probably not too many followers / following, but spending time talking to their followers; there’s the ‘power user’, submitting lots of tweets (probably with links) to thousands of followers; there’s the ‘watcher’ that never tweets and is very social and others.

Engagers are brilliant for talking to others and spreading the word whilst power users, if they retweet you, spread the word far and wide. But a lot of power users and just automated accounts trying affiliate selling.

For monetising a Twitter account, having a good amount of engagers is very useful and they also provide a good way to access other users. Quite simply, send them a message (use the @ method, not a DM). Maybe compliment them on a Tweet. If they see it and reply to you via the same method, all of their Followers see the message and with the way that Twitter users are, if there are enough some might just pop over and follow you.

And these are the quality users, the real people that will read your Tweets and maybe even click their links.

                          

What interested me was that after I followed an extra 70 people and gained in the process an extra 30 followers, most of those new followers were not, as I expected, the people that I had started to follow but ‘random’ people, also with the same interests. A few of the people I had followed had responded and followed me, but the majority of the 30 were unkowns.

They must have seen me on the following list of similar Tweeters and decided to follow me, in the hope that I would then follow them.

Fine, but having increased my own following list to 141, I wasn’t sure about then following 25+ new people. It would look ‘imbalanced’ – following 180 people with 115 followers. It would look desperate. However, by not following them they might unfollow me. It’s getting complicated!

So the answer is to leave it a day or two, let more people start to follow me and then to return the compliment to those that have been waiting the longest. I hope that you are with me here!

This shows the power of how you can gain followers, when you start working on the task. But, there is one trick left in my hand to increase the followers.

                          

The first thing is to get a list of followers built up. When I decided to give it a go (around 10:30) I was following 42 people and had 84 followers. Not exactly a good following, not when you consider that list includes pretty from Russia and so on!

So the first step has to be to increase that list. Ideally, taking it to 2,000 by the end of the month. Yes, seriously. Aim high! Luckily what had prompted this was discovering a list of Twitter profiles of authors over at my favourite article website, which I could categorise by interests.

So I browsed one of their categories and started looking at profiles. At first I just selected those people that had a ‘good’ balance of followers / following. For example, if they were followed by 500 people but only followed 100 themselves (or vice versa), they are unlikely to follow new people so I ignored them.

That built my following list to 112 and by the evening I had also 112 followers. So having a good balance I then increased my following to 140. But this time I added another criteria – I checked that the person was actually actively involved in Tweeting, this was because my next stage needed that.

More tomorrow…

                          

In short, there was a small piece of javascript added to links in tweets. Instead of the reader having to click the link to view the site, just the mouseover action was enough to trigger the opening of the new site. And these new sites were, on occasion, less than ‘family friendly’.

But the code didn’t just open the undesirable website, it also sent a Tweet from the user’s account, spreading the worm through thousands of accounts.

The worm managed to pack so much into each Tweet by exploiting XSS – cross site scripting, where a small piece of Javascript calls a larger piece of code that is hosted elsewhere. Mainly used for innocent purposes, it does leave the hosting website open to such problems. However, there should be no good reason for including javascript in Tweets, so the fix must be quite simple.

Twitter assure users that the vulnerability has now been fixed, presumably blocking all Javascript from Tweets.

                          

All of my post titles are tweeted automatically (a great little WordPress plugin). And because the company name was mentioned in the title of the article that was, of course, included in the Tweet.

Now this other website is very active in its own marketing and within a day had itself noticed by Tweet and read the article. They then Tweeted their own link to my post to their thousands of followers.

The result – well suddenly loads of their followers came across to the site to read the recommended post and see what was happening! A useful traffic blip. I’ve no idea if any of those readers are now following what I am writing, but it is a good example of the power of Twitter and why everyone should be using it.

Using Twitter, and other social media, when you say something good about another person if they notice it they might then pass it onto their followers. It is social network marketing working. Forget all of this spam social marketing that is going around, just stick to what works!

                          ]]> http://www.janric.co.uk/blog/index.php/marketing-tips/unintended-social-marketing/feed/ 0 http://www.janric.co.uk/blog/index.php/search-engines/from-post-to-google-in-15-minutes-using-twitter/ http://www.janric.co.uk/blog/index.php/search-engines/from-post-to-google-in-15-minutes-using-twitter/#comments Sat, 30 Jan 2010 11:07:51 +0000 Keith Lunt http://www.janric.co.uk/blog/?p=55 I wrote a post recently about the emerging importance of social networking in search engine traffic and how important that is for getting good results. In particular, I was looking at Twitter and how Google will be starting to use Twitter to improve its own results.

That article was actually part one of a series. And as though Google was trying to prove a point, a point which was in agreement with what I was writing, within 15 minutes of hitting the publish button in WordPress the Google bot had visited the brand new post and cached the site.

That, I believe, is thanks to a little plugin that is embedded in my blog. I found a fantastic plugin that automatically sends an update to my Twitter account whenever I publish a post to my blog.  A fantastic find! It is one of many similar plugins available, but it did exactly what I wanted. Nothing more, nothing less.

It was amazing that this new blog, which previously I had struggled to get posts listed on Google, was suddenly having its posts listed in no time. And it is not the only one. A second blog is also reacting equally quickly using the same technique.

This does not mean that this little pluggin is the super golden bullet that will get every post listed on Google in 15 minutes. Far from it. I also installed it into a third blog, without the same success. But this is not a sign of failure. In fact, it is a sign that the system is working in a way that I expect it to and hopefully I am following how they are working.

How to best use Twitter for publicising blogs is probably far more than the space remaining here. In fact that subject in itself is probably a couple of sessions and I’ll work through it over a couple of days in my own blog, if you are interested to follow it.

But the results of the speedy way that the blog posts have suddenly started appearing on these two blogs shows that there are benefits to be had by using Twitter in conjunction with a blog. It’s not just a matter of setting up a blog and a Twitter account and having done with it, there is a little bit of work to be done on both. But it is easy.

The thing is, if you are a website owner and want to generate more traffic to your website, then these are techniques you can use without any technical knowledge. Whether you control the design of your website or whether you have paid someone like me to design and run it for you, using these techniques you can generate more interest in your products or posts and hopefully more sales through this added traffic.

This is what these social networking techniques are about, in my opinion. They are not about paying a fortune to get traffic. They are about generating an interest in you that will arrive at your website ready to buy from you. It is something anyone can do!

                          

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