Monetizing Twitter – a review based on experience [ May 5th, 2010 ] Posted in » Make Money, Twitter

A number of people used to blog in the past just so that they could make money. The same is quickly becoming true on Twitter. There are so many Twitter accounts that churn out just automated tweets, and participate in all kinds of services to generate followers. Well, there is good reason for it. If you have anything over a 100 followers on Twitter, you have a good chance of making money on Twitter. Actually, you stand a better chance of making money on Twitter is your followers are organically grown (i.e. if they became your followers because they liked what you tweet, or you were referred by someone as a great person to follow). The reason is that such followers are likelier to read what you tweet, and click on links that you tweet.

So, how do you make money on Twitter? Mostly it involves making a sponsored tweet – yes, you get paid for a tweet. How do you get paid? Well, you sign up with services which allow you to do that. There are tons of these services. Some are of course fraudulent, and others are not so well paying. I tried my hand at this, and shortlisted this to three services which seem promising (one of which has already paid me twice). Below are short and sweet reviews of these three services, as I see them.

The first one (and the one I doubt the most) is called Magpie. My observations for this service are:

  • It auto-tweets to your account – set it, forget it. Although, you can set it for pre-approval so that you go and approve each tweet, but you can also set it for auto-approval.
  • It allows pay-per-tweet model. So, you actually get paid per tweet.
  • The drawback is that you can only cash out once you reach $50.

With Magpie, in less than a month, I have already accumulated $5.09 (as of this post), and it has tweeted out about 22 tweets for this amount. That is a good amount of earning. However, the moment of truth only comes in if you get paid. There are reports of people who have gotten paid, and there are reports of people who said that Magpie declared their Twitter accounts as violating terms, and so cancelled their payments. So, I don’t know what would happen with my account. I don’t think I am violating their terms of service, so let’s see.

The second one (and the one I don’t doubt as much, since its by a company which is well known). It’s called SponsoredTweets, by a company called Izea.Here are my observations on this service:

  • It works just as some of the other Izea services work – you get invited to opportunities (I got about 4 invites in the last month). If you don’t respond to the opportunity, then it can expire. So it does not auto-approve for you. Once you accept an opportunity (you can negotiate the tweet price), you write your tweet, and then wait for advertiser approval. Once the advertiser approves, SponsoredTweets tweets out the tweet you wrote on your behalf automatically.
  • It is a pay-per-tweet model.
  • You can only cash out once you reach $50.
  • The good thing is that you can set your own price. So, if you have a lot of followers, you can charge a higher price per tweet.

In 4 tweets, I have accumulated $1.95 in my account. The good thing is that I am certain, that i will get a payout whenever I make it to $50. Izea has a very good track record of payment (and I have been paid by them before while using PayPerPost and SocialSpark).

The final one and the one that is the best so far is called MyLikes. This is a very new company on the scene, but they are great. They have an overall StumbleUpon like model (not entirely) where you can basically create a ‘like’ for anything in the world. And that is what you do on the site. I love to spend time on it. However, part of the model is that you can create “Sponsored Likes” which you can then tweet out to Twitter, and then get paid for it. Here are my observations:

  • It is a pay-per-click model, primarily. So every sponsored like has a link, and you get paid for the number of clicks that link generates. They do have a pay-per-tweet, but you hardly every see campaigns which are pay-per-tweet.
  • It only allows you to send one sponsored tweet every day.
  • It pays you weekly – yes weekly, every Friday.
  • The minimum payout is $2. Yes that is two dollars.

In the last month, I have been paid twice, with the third payment expected this weekend. Below is a screenshot from my PayPal account showing one of the payments from MyLikes. In total, I have made a little over $12 from MyLikes so far.

image

So, as you can see, it is not a bad service to be used.

There are many other our there, but I have decided to stay with these three. Between them, I get a maximum of 2-4 paid tweets in a day, and that helps me keep the paid content to a relatively low percentage, since I send out about 20-30 tweets a day on average. If you are going to check any of the services out, I request you to use the above links since they contain referral information which helps me out, and it doesn’t harm you any.

Also, if you would like to follow me on Twitter, then click here.

Update (Jun 21, 2010): Well, I have been into these services a bit longer now. I thought I would update this article a little. Of the three services I have reviewed above:

  • MyLikes continues to excel. I have gotten a payment from them every week. Once again, you can sign up with them by clicking here.
  • SponsoredTweets continues to accrue money for me. After a certain while, I got access to Pay-Per-Click as well. There are always some opportunities available. I tend to use the PayPerTweet opportunities more, though those are not available as often. To sign up, you can click here.
  • Magpie has been a disappointment. I have not received a tweet from them in over 12 days. I have a little under $15 just sitting there which I can’t withdraw till I reach $50. I will update this post if this situation changes, but I am not keeping my hopes too high.

Aside from the two above, I finally decided to try out another service called RevTwt. I have only tweeted from it twice so far (again trying to keep sponsored content to a minimum in my stream). But, they always have a fairly large inventory of ads to tweet from. I have heard a lot about them, so I am going to keep my hopes up for this system.

Shooting mosquitoes with lasers

While this is old news, I don’t think many people have heard of this project. Intellectual Ventures (which is an inventions company) is working on ways to fight malaria. While they have plenty of things going on, the one that I find the coolest is a Sci-fi style laser system which can kill mosquitoes (which are malaria carriers).

image Their lab is conducting experiments on identifying mosquitoes flying through the air and then guiding a laser through a computer to hit the mosquito and burn it to oblivion. They are backing up this research with a lot of other information on mosquitoes.

For example, their system differentiates between male and female mosquitoes since the females are the ones that bite humans and transmit malaria. So, the laser only knocks out the female blood suckers.

Malaria claims a lot of lives worldwide every year, and any idea that is working towards solving this problem, no matter how whacky, deserves support. The ultimate goal for this research is to be able to deploy these lasers as a photonic fence which can be used to surround habitations. These fences will be safe for anything other than a female mosquito to pass through.

To read more about the experiments on this topic by Intellectual Ventures, visit the following link: http://intellectualventureslab.com/?tag=malaria.

November 24th, 2009 | 1 Comment

A-B-C of Stem Cells

A lot has been written on stem cells, and yet almost no one knows about them (relatively speaking). Since we are going to have a baby in a few months time, I have been going through this topic quite a bit. While the topic is way more than what can be covered in a blog post, here’s a quick 1-2-3 version of it. The purpose of this is to just give the reader a very initial taste of this topic so that he/she is intrigued enough to do more research and get educated on this topic.

What are Stem Cells?

Stem Cells are the basis for all the cells in the body – each cell is created from a stem cell – whether it is a brain cell or another body organ. Scientists are finding new ways to work with these cells so that they can be programmed to convert into the desired cell type.

How do we get Stem Cells?

Well, there are many ways (as there are many sources of stem cells), and by far the easiest is to collect the cells during child birth – the umbilical cord blood of a baby as well as the amniotic fluid both contain stem cells which can be harvested during the child birth and stored for future use and research.

Why should I care about Stem Cells?

The main reason for knowing about this is because initial research has shown a lot of potential in treating ailments such as brain damage, cancer, spinal cord injuries, heart damage, diabetes, etc. to even more mundane things such as baldness, growing teeth, etc. The potential in this research is life changing. A lot of people (such as me and my wife) are opting for harvesting stem cells during the birth of their children and store it so that in case it is ever required in the future, we have it handy.

There is a lot of information that is out there regarding this topic, including controversies, since certain type of stem cells are only recovered from a live fetus or a cloned one. One should be aware of these as well. Some good starting resources for learning about these topics are the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and the WikiPedia Stem Cell page (as usual).

Spread the message, talk to your friends about it, discuss the pros and cons of it, learn more – the normal person on the street should be aware of topics like these. The more people who participate in this, the more momentum research such as this gains (and of course, the cheaper it becomes for the normal person to gain access to research and treatments such as these).

November 22nd, 2009 | 1 Comment

YouTube for Audio

I was recently looking for a service like YouTube where one can host audio files for free. While YouTube is great for hosting video files, it just doesn’t have any support for audio. So, where could I go? I didn’t want just any file hosting service. I wanted some place where I could upload the audio file, and then get a code to embed this file in various web pages if I wanted. I wanted to track how many times the file has been listened to.

After much searching and rejecting tons of file hosting sites, I came about the perfect candidate: HoundBite. HoundBite is a site which lets you host audio clips by either uploading onto the site, or even simply recording directly. The size of the uploaded clips cannot be more than 8 MB, and the length of recording cannot be more than 15 minutes. That fell right within my requirements of what I needed.

So, if you are looking for a YouTube like site but for audio, then give HoundBite a try.

November 20th, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Awesome birding shots

I am a very amateur bird photographer, so it really gets me excited to see people take photographs like these. I have never been this close to a bird in the wild. But I can imagine how excited these guys are. Lovely shots both. And to see more exciting birding shots, I suggest you visit the photostream of the photographer on Flickr – http://www.flickr.com/photos/slingher/

Here are those photos:

November 13th, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Asterix Turns 50

One of my favorite comics ever turned 50 this week. Asterix by Uderzo and Goscinny. I have the entire collection at home, and since I was a kid I have read these in both Hindi and English. Originally, a French comic, this has been translated in a large number of languages, and has been printed millions of times. On the 50th anniversary of Asterix, a new comic (Vol 34) has been released (which I will get as soon as I can), and this is a great news for all Asterix fans all over. I have read all of mine multiple times, and here comes something new.

asterix

November 1st, 2009 | Leave a Comment

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