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You’ve likely happened across this guide because you’ve built up a bit of a following, feel like you’re getting good engagement, and be ready to see whether you can make money using Twitter.
There’s good news and bad news.
Let’s have the bad news first, then we can have the good news as dessert. The bad news is that Twitter doesn’t, at present, have a straightforward monetization method. Unlike YouTube, you can’t simply get paid for ads shown during your videos or get part of a creator fund like TikTok. But before you smash your phone and call it quits, remember the tasty good news.
The good news is that you can, very much so, make money from Twitter. First off, they are genuinely working on a revenue share model where content creators will have monetization options. It’ll be a bit more like a Twitch model, where users themselves make payments directly to content creators rather than a passive source thanks to ads. Also, who knows what good ol’ Elon has in store for the platform.
People have, and continue to, make money from Twitter. So there’s no reason you can’t too. If you’ve got the following, you’ve got the engagement and you’ve got the content, then you’re well on your way.
As we’ve alluded to above, you can’t expect to make money on Twitter unless you have a solid audience that is engaging with you, but also they have to trust you. This is especially true if you’re planning on touting products or offering sponsored content. If you’re asking people to put their trust in brands that you endorse, they have to trust you first.
Realistically this step should be placed immediately after you sign up for an account. Having a profile that stands out, is interesting, and genuinely makes people want to click on it should be the first step on your monetization journey.
“How can I make my profile exciting enough to be visited?” I hear you ask. Here are our top tips:
Bio Writing Tips:
Clear, concise with a personal touch. That’s the best advice we can give. You haven’t got a whole lot of space, only 160 characters, to perfectly sum up who you are and what you do. We’d recommend including your name, what you do, why you’re good at it (think recognition), and what you can give someone who follows you.
Get creative with it. You might even consider just adding single words. Or using the location section for something else than location.
Also, don’t be afraid to mix it up. If you think it’s not working for you, then change it. Try different elements until you have a good feel and you’re getting engagement, and even then keep things fresh.
There’s not much point in following you if you don’t deliver content, for that is what Twitter is all about. Work out what you want to share, and do it. Make sure to share on a regular basis. You might even consider a schedule and stick to it. People will, eventually, come to expect to hear from you and be confused if you miss a post or stop posting. Be sure to post at least daily, ideally up to 3 tweets a day.
While exciting at the time, a single viral tweet isn’t going to stop you from falling into obscurity if you don’t post regularly following it.
Remember that value should be at the front of your mind at all times. How can you benefit your audience? If you nail this, then you’ll begin to pick up followers similar to them organically, and your audience will naturally grow.
One of the biggest Twitter sins is the “Tweet and Forget”. When you send out a tweet, it begins to get comments and traction, but you don’t reply or respond or engage with your followers. This is an easy way to lose followers and all your hard work.
Make sure to engage with followers as widely as you can, that means commenting on tweets other than your post, commenting on their posts, replying to comments, and, if you ask a question in a tweet, showing genuine interest in their replies. If anything, it’s only polite. You wouldn’t start a conversation with someone and then just walk off partway through in a face-to-face situation.
This is one of the biggest factors in building trust between yourself and your audience.
There are many, many people already out there doing what you’re looking to do. One of the best things you can do is reach out and see if you can learn from them. Try to measure your current size and engagement, consider where you want to be, and then look for accounts at the level. Follow them, learn what gets engagement, and reach out directly to them. You’ll find that many accounts will be happy to share their journey with you.
If you’re a savvy writer, you can make money writing tweets for other accounts.
You can do this by reaching out to accounts and making connections. The first thing they’ll do is look at your own account to see engagement and following. But if they like what they see you can open a conversation with them. The best accounts include companies that need clients and companies that sell luxury/expensive products.
When you reach out, introduce yourself, share a sample of your work, including an example tweet for them and suggest they use it and see what engagement they get. If it works, build the relationship and write regularly for them.
Once you’ve got a solid following, you will begin to get brands to reach out to you, asking if you offer sponsored tweets. Here brands are looking to leverage your platform for their own needs. Be careful which brands you work with; make sure they align with your values.
Offers not coming in yet? Reach out to brands and pitch yourself. Plus you can use sites such as SponsoredTweets or PaidPerTweet to see which brands are out there.
Many platforms have brands looking to work with affiliates:
Each of these will offer a percentage of sales that come from visitors who visit their site following a link from you. Find a set of products that work for you, align with your personal brand, and promote them. But be wary of how many you share. The last thing you want is to turn off followers by spamming them with affiliate links.
The same rules as affiliate links apply, but if you sell products that relate to your audience, then promote them. A good rule to work by is the 80:20 rule. Only around ⅕ of your tweets should be selling products, even if that might be too high. Remember your original style and tweets, and keep them coming.
If your website is your true money-making area, it makes sense to send people there. If you’ve written a great blog, shared some infographics or video content, host it on your website, and link to it from tweets. You could even search for hashtags or tweets from your followers and see if they’re talking about services or products you offer, then link them to them in a comment.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this isn’t a Twitter-based monetization, but if you have an email lead magnet, including this as a link from your bio or via tweets you send, it can massively grow your email list. Once your email list grows you can leverage it in traditional ways to sell products and services.
Giving things away to make money? That doesn’t sound right. But giveaways are a great way to build engagement with your followers, and it also gets them to see the products you’re selling. You’ll likely pick up considerable followers during a giveaway, especially if you have retweets as part of the entry, but be wary that not all of these followers will be with you for the long term.
Another way of spending money to make money is to promote your tweets, especially product-driven tweets, which is an excellent way to drive leads towards your website or Twitter profile. Twitter ads are great because you can be hyper-specific on who you target, and you’re able to target people who don’t follow your account. It’s a great way to promote products and services and build an audience.
Twitter Media Studio is a relatively new platform that is part of Twitter, available to those in the Amplify Publisher Program. It allows you to drop ads into your Twitter video content in a similar way that YouTube does. There are plenty of other features that you can also make use of, such as live streams, promotion, a library of content, and an analytics suite.
Monetizing your Twitter could quickly become a full-time job, but it pays dividends once the initial and continued effort is put in. Remember to always put your audience first, don’t treat them as just a cash cow, they followed you because they liked your content!
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