Can You Make Money Online from Twitter?

Posted by SantiLikhit

Written by Trent Brownrigg · June 4, 2009

If you aren’t on Twitter yet then you are one of the few people who aren’t, and if you have never heard of Twitter then you must have been living in a jungle cave for the past year or two. Every internet marketer I know is on Twitter and it seems like that’s all any of them can talk about these days. But does anyone actually make money from Twitter? Have you?

I have been on Twitter for a while now and I have yet to see how you can really make money from it even though everyone keeps talking about how great it is for business. Don’t go thinking I am some newbie that doesn’t know anything either because I definitely am not. I have been an internet marketer successfully making money online for over 6 years.

Sure, I’ve heard a few stories here and there of people who have used certain methods to make money on Twitter, but they are few and far between. And even those “success stories” are usually only small sums of money. Plus, when you consider the excessive amounts of time most people spend on Twitter to make that little bit of money, you could utilize several other marketing techniques to achieve better results in the same amount of time.

Then there’s the argument you will hear from the Twitter faithful about how great it is for traffic. Is it really? Not if you really think about it…

Say you have 1000 followers and you “tweet” your newest blog post in hopes that your followers will go check it out. Chances are most of them won’t be on Twitter at the time you tweet it so hardly any of them will see your tweet anyway. However, let’s be really conservative and say half of them are on, so 500 might see it.

Now, most of the remaining 500 are probably following hundreds, if not thousands, of other people, so your tweet will most likely be pushed down almost instantly and very few of them will see it. But let’s be really conservative again and say half of them do see your tweet. We are down to 250 now.

This could go on and on but let’s estimate highly again and say that 10% of the remaining 250 actually do click the link to go to your blog post. You just go a whopping 25 visitors! And probably none of them will actually be targeted visitors that will do anything to actually make you money once they are at your blog.

However, I am feeling generous so let’s say you have Adsense displayed on your blog and normally get a 5% click through rate. Well, 5% of 25 is 1.25 – so you would get just one click. If you’re lucky, you might make 10 cents or so. In reality you probably wouldn’t make anything though because “social traffic” rarely clicks on ads, and traffic from Twitter is considered social traffic.

So, can you make money from Twitter? I doubt it! And even if you do there’s a strong chance you could have made a lot more by using other internet marketing techniques instead.

If you don’t want to take my word for it then give it a try and see how it works for you. If you do figure out how to make money on Twitter then I would love to hear how. Just don’t waste too much of your time trying!

Let me end by stating that I am not saying you shouldn’t use Twitter. I get on there almost every day so that would be very hypocritical of me. It does have some advantages and there are several tools you can use to automate it so you don’t waste all your time there.

The point I am trying to get across is that you shouldn’t be spending too much time on Twitter because it’s really not very productive for your business. There are many other ways to make money that are much better than Twitter and several marketing methods that will bring you a lot more traffic.

By the way, since we’re on the subject of Twitter… You can follow me @trentab to get real tips on how to make money online.

• at 2:50 AM