This is the 3rd lesson in my free course on Twitter, aptly called "The Art of Twitter".
In the first lesson, I showed you how to stop sounding so repetitive. In the second lesson, I taught you how to put some personality in your tweets so you level up and stand out. Despite all that awesomeness, I truly believe I saved the best for last in this lesson.
Now you get to learn few ways to make money using Twitter. It's focused on things you can do right now, regardless of your Twitter following. I could easily sell this separately (I may at some point), but you get it free. I'll also show you real numbers I've done.
I'm not here to boast or brag. I'm here to teach. If you've been part of my list or followed me on social media, you know I always keep it real--for better or worse.
How to Make Money On Twitter
As I've said before, there is no such thing as "making money online. There are only products and services that people have always offered and now they can offer them on the internet. The internet offers producers 3 things they never had before:
- Specific Targeting
- Inexpensive scaling
- Worldwide (effectively) Instantaneous Reach
Regardless of the size of your following, Twitter allows you to take advantage of these attributes in a way that can pay you quite well. You're already dicking around on social media. You may was well profit from it.
Twitter is unique among social media platforms in that people don't need to follow or know you to interact with you (tremendous limitation of facebook, though it's improving). Twitter also easily allows you to share ideas that resonate with you (forget about this on Instagram).
What this means is that you don't need a website to immediately make money online. You don't even need a product. I'm not telling that you can produce cash out of thin air, but Twitter puts you in a position to do quite a lot. Perhaps,even, some things you've never thought of but can quickly change your life IF you're willing to work and hustle.
The following is a list of ways that allow you to quickly make an extra $500-$1000 per month. The list is, by no means, exhaustive. Not only are there things I'm leaving out (for brevity, not scarcity--the course goes into much greater depth but it's longer than a blog), but new ways to make money will always spring up. There are websites where guys are selling human feces--they are literally selling shit.
If that doesn't give you hope, then maybe you just aren't cut out to make a few extra hundred dollars using your Twitter account.
Tweet Writing
Just because your account isn't big doesn't mean you can't help someone with a big account.
If you have a talent for writing (or you're willing to learn from my course), then it's amazing what you can do by drafting 50-100 tweets for a person or company with a big following. Honestly, the following doesn't need to be THAT large for you to reach out to them.
There are PLENTY of people who are interested in growing, but beyond a few lucky hits, they aren't that great at writing for the platform. Or they don't care to put the time in to become better. Either way, this is great news for you. The best targets are accounts that are:
- Selling something
- Not tweeting often
- You notice their tweets are just bad (which should be able to do after enrolling in the course)
Companies with Twitter accounts are wonderful targets for this because they tend to hire people who claim to know social media. What they don't understand is that Twitter is a different beast and on that platform, engagement is earned through ideas rather than won through pretty pictures.
As for what to charge, that depends on the body of work you can present. I currently charge $1500/month for a minimum of 200 tweets plus retweeting (next thing we'll discuss), but when I first started, I only charged $300. Then I gradually worked my way up.
This is from a round of clients on payday for my tweet writing and retweeting services.
Retweeting
Many people think of this, but they talk themselves out of it, believing their following isn't big enough.
The truth is that if you have an account 4 figures or bigger, you can charge the next lowest order of magnitude for a retweeting campaign. You'll be limited by what you can charge until you grow, but there's no reason an account with 3-10k followers can't pitch this service to someone with a mid 3 figure account.
Not all small accounts want to grow. Some are content being observers.
A good prospect has likely put effort into their profile, including a real profile picture. The module in the upcoming Twitter course teaches the two main type of profiles you can build for maximum growth. If you see someone building one of these profiles, but they have a follow that is an order of magnitude smaller than yours, then you can reach down and help them out.
I waited until I crossed the 10k mark to do this, but I've since instructed clients to start doing this earlier. A 5000 follower account can help a 900 follower account grow. A 900 follower account can help a 90 follower account. As the rappers say, there's levels to this shit.
What you charge will depend on the level you're at. Make sure the quality and style of the account matches your account, otherwise not only will they not grow, you'll lose followers as well. Also, you can also justify the price increase by quote tweeting and adding value. If you're a good writer, you will not only help them grow but you'll also grow.
Translation (For my bilingual people from non-English speaking countries)
English is one of the most widely spoken languages there is, but it's not the only language on Twitter.
Translation technology is still shit at carrying the exact meaning of a phrase in one language to another (especially idiomatic phrases or translating modern colloquial language). There are people who will pay to have their tweets put into other languages and shared with that language network. As always, the more followers you have the better, but you don't need much if your primary language is NOT English for this to work.
I've never done this, but I've been told there is a bit of money in this for the dedicated hustler. The targets are almost always companies or big accounts looking to expand their reach. Obviously there is a great market for translation of books, but this list is dedicated to how you can make money STRICTLY from twitter without setting something else up.
With that said, target people selling a thing where everything is being communicated in English. You'll likely be offered other jobs. If you want more work, the world is yours. This leads nicely into my next Twitter hustle.
Teaching
This technically falls under something you need to do outside of Twitter, but I'm including this based on one assumption: you already have a skill that other people would pay to learn.
You may be bilingual. There are people looking for conversation practice with a person who speaks your native language.
Maybe you have exceptional math skills and someone needs a tutor.
You can offer your ability to write blog posts or essays for school.
There is consulting if you have expertise in something related to overcoming common life issues.
This is an opportunist hustle. You have to pay attention to people discussing what you're good at OR you can start tweeting about what you do in a compelling and engaging way. Remember: you can't advertise and market on Twitter in a regular way. You have to spark engagement and get people to share.
If you can do this, they'll retweet your offer and people will reach out ASSUMING you have your profile optimally designed (as I teach in the upcoming full-length course on building and growing your Twitter).
Amazon Affiliates
A lot of people shit on the Amazon Affiliates program because of its ridiculous low commission (I believe it's something dumb like 2%. It's not even worth me looking up to verify). Here's been my experience with it:
Amazon affiliates is what opened my eyes to the world of making money online. I earned my first 6 cents online when someone clicked on my link when I reviewed Scott Adam's classic "How to Fail at Almost Anything And Still Win Big".
That feeling of seeing that something is possible is worth it by itself. The real reason I recommend amazon affiliates is it's relatively easy to make an extra $100-$150 dollars per month. I have 77k followers and I still don't make much than I did with 7000 followers. Amazon is weird that way.
One big plus of its system is that once someone clicks on your affiliate link, you get a percentage of anything they buy off the site for 24 hours. Amazon is the king at getting people buy shit they don't need, so this is great news for anyone looking to make extra money. All you have to do is get them there.
I've used the following two methods for making money from amazon:
- Tweeting a compelling quoted line or screenshot from a book I'm reading with the amazon affiliate link.
- Tweeting a short discussion of my experience with a product I'm using with the amazon affiliate link.
I'm not walking you through how to sign up for the amazon affiliate program. It's pretty easy, and once you do it, you'll be free to tweet out links to things in the fashion I described earlier.
Note: For people worried about you having to say it's an affiliate link or you risk being shut down by amazon, the following is just my opinion based on experience: I've never once mentioned that any affiliate link I put out from amazon is an affiliate link. I think people know and even if they don't, I think Amazon likes money too much. Technically, you're supposed to, but I never have.
Still, you've been made aware so my responsibility as your teacher has been met.
Pure Affiliate Marketing
This is the grand daddy of them all. Affiliate marketing is, as the Notorious B.I.G. would say "Strictly for live men. Not for freshmen." I suppose it's proper for me to assume that you have no idea what affiliate marketing is.
From an affiliate sale in May
Affiliate marketing is where you promote something and if a person buys through the link you use, you get a percentage of the sale. How much you can make varies, but it depends on the number of people you can get the offer in front of and the percentage offered per sale.The twitter course I've got dropping on Monday teaches you how to DRAMATICALLY increase your following so that anything you sale will be exposed to a wider audience.
What can you affiliate market for, exactly?
Affiliate sales for a product over a period of time
Anything you use, really. It's the year 2019. Most companies offer an affiliate program because it's a win/win:
You talk about how it's helped you (or show results), people buy, and you both make some money. You don't need a big following to make a few extra hundred bucks this summer from Twitter and affiliate marketing.
In Conclusion
This is just a short list of things you can do for money. I didn't want to give you anything I haven't done myself. My partner Tony (@tonytrillions on Twitter) goes further in depth on the skills you can develop and make money with on Twitter.
The courses teaches you how to not only grow your account, but also generate extreme engagement so that you can do everything spread your message, grow your website, or have even bigger paydays than the ones I showed in this blog.
This marks the conclusion of the free mini-course. Tomorrow, I'm sending you a short video message that will wrap everything up and give you final idea of what you get if you sign up to the course. I look forward to sharing the video with you all until next time...
The rest is up to you.