At the Revenue Bootcamp conference on Friday our panel was asked how we would monetize Twitter. I took the lead on this one and talked about how I was already monetizing Twitter… but just for my own benefit.
I also went on and talked about how there is a HUGE market imbalance going on right now with Twitter traffic.
I started doing sponsored tweets about a year ago when I was offered $50 a tweet and recently as much as $400 a tweet.
But the opportunity really lies in arbitraging Twitter traffic. There are about a dozen Twitter advertising networks out there. Traffic can be purchased anywhere from .5 cents to .15 per tweet.
I will show you my first examples playing around with arbitraging Twitter traffic.
A couple months ago while browsing the Social Spark opportunities I noticed they had added CPC deals. This means you get paid per click that you send to them. They also have a special link you can use for social network traffic like Twitter and Facebook.
Social Spark is buying Twitter traffic for this offer at .24 cents per click.
I shot the owner of RevTwt an email asking what would be a good price per click to ensure that I got a lot of clicks to do a test with and he told me anything above .10 cents should be good, so I went with .14 per click to get some interest.
So I made my ad:
and did a $200, 5 day test to see what we were working with.
You can see all the sponsored tweets by searching for “blu frog #spon” on Twitter search.
Now keep in mind I honestly was not worried about making money but rather wanted to do a test to see what average CPC could be earned. I was more concerned about getting enough volume to do a proper test.
When the test was complete, the results were very encouraging.
The RevTwt showed over the 5 day period I received 1166 clicks costing me $174.90
Social Spark showed I had made $127.20 on 530 clicks:
As you can see there is a HUGE discrepancy in clicks… over 2x.
Social Spark massively (putting it lightly) scrubs the clicks using a 3rd party fraud detection software called Click Forensics and they are SUPER SUPER scrubalicious when it comes to validating clicks from fraudulent ones.
So while this campaign lost 50 bucks it really got my fire going because consider this… I choose a CPC way too high at .14 cents and I choose one of the lowest paying CPC offers, blu frog, at .24 cents and yet was still in the game.
Since that first experience I have been paying .05 to .09 cents per click from various Twitter ad networks and sending it to much higher paying offers like Blockbuster, Disney, and Seaworld which pay in the 70-80 cent range per click from Twitter PLUS you can negotiate a much higher rate once you show them you can create some volume. Now after dialing it in a bit we are seeing 4-6x on our ROI. Not bad.
So why am I sharing this gem with you and not soaking it all in?
The problem is there is just not enough advertisers to make this worth our time. We can make $300-$500 a day in profit on Twitter and I know that for a lot of you guys out there trying to make something happen that is all you need. For us we need to move the needle a little more to really devote resources to it.
I honestly believe NONE of these Twitter advertising networks are doing it correctly and the first one that does is going to crush it!
There are really 2 types of Twitter ad networks right now.
1 – Going after spammers/bottom feeders.
2 – Going after celebrities or ONLY high follow count accounts.
The first Twitter ad network that works will be the one that appeals to everyone and does not take more then 5% of the cut.
Its such an opportunity that if I was not tied up with a non compete from our Auction Ads I would start a Twitter Advertising network in a minute. C’est La Vie.
Please before doing this method make sure you have permission from IZEA as I did.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2414 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
Images provided by ShutterStock
Using Delicious to Understand Your Users 
Don’t Worry – People Know 
Sneaky Facebook Advertising Tricks – Dialing In Your Campaigns Part 2 
{ 121 comments… read them below or add one }
I think you’ll be surprised at what opportunities lie ahead with Izea and their move toward Sponsored Tweets.
But you probably already know a little about that being on their advisory board and all.
Yup been through the system Its nice but I still think its missing a bit… will be interesting when it launches.
So how’s your situation with Matt on sponsored tweets?
This is something that had just never occurred to me. I have a Social Spark account. Time to dust it off and give it another look.
Nice post Shoemeister..
Thanks for sharing this. I know since you shared it tons of people are going to try this as well. I have one question though. If you was on a tight budget how much would you put those this?
Interesting post, gotta love arbitrage!
The ROI is definitely there… but SocialSpark’s 5 day delay for CPC conversions (for them to scrub) can really make it annoying to optimize for a campaign on the first test as you don’t know how much $ you will be credited for until 5 days later when you presumably have had your campaign pooling money at it for days.
Oh well, as long as the CPC buying is cheap it shouldn’t be a big problem.
I haven’t had much luck with twitter so far, but maybe I just need to rethink my strategies. Thanks for the info.
That’s fascinating, Jeremy. It’s going to be interesting to see how this continues to evolve.
Great Article. I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of this now!
Darin
Nice post Shoe, Twittering makes good business sense
Jeremy, do you think this sort of commercialisation of the twittersphere could be the beginning of the end for it? Who wants to login to twitter and see nothing but their follows adtweets?
quite the contrary…
Just like advertising everywhere else if people are turned off by it they will unfollow or stop reading.
Jeremy have you seen a drop off in followers / demand since doing arbitrage Tweets? Or are you immune because most of your followers are following you BECAUSE you report on this kind of thing?
The issue I see is that you spend resources building up a Twitter following where you have some semblance of a relationship with followers, then lose followers en masse by sending the equivalent of unsolicited spam to them.
Have you seen a backlash from this or do you fall in the camp that says to just create tonnage with the spam / bottom feeder accounts?
I dont think you are understanding…. I am buying other peoples tweets not mine.
But I have seen a pretty large influx of followers since the revenueboot camp conference where I gave some pretty good details about my sponsored tweets.
Oh, got it. That makes a lot more sense. Sorry for the confusion.
But in general would you say that trying to monetize a Twitter account directly is damaging to a “real” account (as opposed to a spam account that really just exists to spam)?
Thanks.
I think it’s a lot like having a blog. How much commercial stuff will your readers put up with without being turned off. For some people it’s none at all. For others, though, the tolerance is much higher.
Hey , Nice tip .. I was not aware of such thing websites .. and I might say now I am quite aware of all this stuff ..thanks a lot .
Interesting article. I’m new to twitter and didn’t even know you could pay for tweets. I guess i’ll have to look into it more.
Thanks for the usual helpful advice.
I think this is a nice post about something I had no idea was even happening. Thanks for the info and another way to monetize a website and it’s users.
Was wondering where all the Payperpost affiliates ads coming from, lol. Thanks for the mention.
A little more background for your Blu Frog ad experiment:
As of yesterday, there were a total of 25,020 clicks we let through to the advertisers landing page, out of these, only 1,166 passed our click fraud and bot click filtering and was charged to you. That is less than 5% of the clicks. An advertiser can download click stats of all the clicks in real time to do his own analysis.
In addition, there are over 10,000 clicks that were blocked right away because they were from outside targeted countries of your ad or someone clicking on his own post, among other things. These were not sent to the advertiser’s landing page.
3rd party click fraud filtering do not correctly handle clicks from 3rd party Twitter apps and mobile apps, which is a large part of Twitter traffic. Our data shows that our filtering is more accurate than the third party offerings. There is a review at marketingprofessor.com showing that he got more valid clicks than what he was charged.
We recently launched the Elite Twitterers program so that advertisers can target elite users with tens of thousands of followers. We have several hundreds of elite users in our network. More exciting new features coming up soon.
Less than 5% of the clicks! That is surely a seriously skewed result. Does that mean that 95 of stuff coming from twitter is spam?
I think that Twitter is growing so fast right now and with the crazy amount of traffic and the viral aspect you can get a lot of clicks cheap.
But if you could get other people to RT your offer then the offer would be a winner for sure.
Talk soon
Charles
So, what twitter should do now is to implement their own ad network so they can make money with their website…
thats what i suggested at the conference
Any idea if that’s what they’re thinking, or something along those lines? I know some people who have inside knowledge have said that the monetization plan is huge. This would definitely fit.
Great post. Another way to make money…another distraction for me. Hard to stay focus when there are so many possibilities out there.
Awesome article – I love seeing new ideas like this.
One question – when you say “Since that first experience I have been paying .05 to .09 cents per click from various Twitter ad networks”…which other Twitter ad networks have you been using?
Forgive me if that’s a dumb question – I’m new to this whole “Twitter ad” concept.
This is why people keep coming back here – there’s always great new advice, info, and opportunities. I didn’t even know about Social Spark until now. Great post!
Exciting stuff. Thanks for the information; have inspired me to look at my twitter again.
Yes you are right. I didn’t even know about Social Spark. It seems to be a good concept. Thanks again to rpovide this information. Would certainly give it a try.
Shoe – you may have opened the floodgate for twitter advertising
Check out TweetROI too. In our first week online, the average CPC is $0.24, and our first affiliate marketer made a profit in just 6 tweets. Our userrank system that allows you to bid more for more influential twitterers, among other things, ensures spammers don’t take over your marketer message.
hmmm .24 cents is pretty high. Best of luck but another network that doesn’t get it IMO
I signed up as a marketer on TweetROI but it doesn’t accept Paypal payments. Bummer.
Shannon, PayPal is the only way we work. Contact us through our site and we’ll sort it out for you.
Jeremy, sorry you feel that way- can you be more specific? $0.24 is a steal compared to AdWords- and we deliver quality tweets, you pay more or less depending on the influence of the Twitterer- that’s what makes our service unique. Thanks and hope you give it a try!
wow!!! I didn’t knew this before, maybe i should start monetizing my twitter traffic, good thanks for this shoe
So what, exactly, do you think the ideal twiiter ad platform would do? This is intriguing to me and I wonder what I should be looking for… especially since I’m sure new platform will be popping up over the next few months.
Great post, thanks. Actually, that’s exactly what I am starting right now (in experimental stage, not open to public yet), just need my social dude to get from the vacation… but it’s always nice to hear that other people think the same.
You do realize that .24 cents is a quarter of a cent and $0.24 is a quarter of a dollar? The difference is that one is 100 times as much as the other.
Shoe do you think buying a sponsored tweet on these networks will help you when you want to pitch a new launch of a new product of yours? It looks to me like something that makes a bit sense though but just wanna know what you think?
its been fascinating as monetising twitter has been something really new to all off us, thanks for the share!
This sounds like quite the deal, I knew about monotizing twitter traffic before and have done so quite a few times, but never looked at it from this presperctive.
Yeah, I actually heard this thing about Socialspark making CPC offers for all unverified blogs too. This we can use to earn a lot from Twitter and Facebook!
First of all, this has been a really informative post. I haven’t been a Twitter user for a long time, so it feels good get ideas and to know that there are ways to make money from Twitter. You are right when you say that most of us are waiting for something to just happen on Twitter. Thanks for sharing this useful information.
Hey thats good information for Twitter traffic. I will try this one.
Thanks for sharing this Shoe
very very interesting article , never thought about making money from twitter like this…i’m goign to sign up and try it out right away
Shoe, you love Twitter so much, why dont you buy it and monetize it, I am sure you can leverage much more from it.
By your reasoning I should buy google and gmail correct?
They were offered $500 Million from facebook and turned it down.
Isn’t it the other way round?
Kind of a dumb question, but I take it than that socialspark are okay with the arbitrage? Your account probably has more leeway to deal with advertisers being who you are, but for new users it seems that advertisers plunk blogs and twitter together, so if you want to advertise on twitter you may still need a qualifying blog to get the twitter code.
As of last check there were only 3 companies that were not requiring qualified people to tweet there products, when you check what the qualifications are it looks like they want blog rankings.
Maybe a bit more scrutiny on the networks side and they could see some larger numbers.
Well arbitrage is the profit from a market imbalance its not the actual process so if you are asking if they are ok with me making money from tweets on twitter the answer is yes.
Maybe you could nudge them into fixing their own imbalance with regards to the blogs and twitter thing not being seperate, thanks for the quick response though.
I agree with your thoughts Mubin.
Thanks for sharing this gem Shoe.
But will these all monetization activities destroy the reputation of Twitter for being a good place to socialize – that is to really follow and create relationships with people? It’s all to monetize and not to socialize.
I don’t think so. It’s like when I first started putting ads on my blog people said they would never read it again… yet it grew like crazy.
As long as the person you choose to follow ads value I don’t see why you will unfollow them.
Brilliant example to illustrate your point there, Jeremy! Advertising is one of the things that people are growing more and more accustomed to, and if you can monetize your socializing I see no problem with that.
Thanks Schoemaker, enjoyed the post. I can’t wait for the day that someone finds a legit way to monetize these social networking sites — without offending the users.
Raw Clicks: 554
Valid Clicks: 0
Good old scrubs.
We definitely are only seeing the beginning of the Twitter phenomenom, and the concept of making cash from tweets really appeals to me.
Kudos to you for sharing your insight so freely, I do hope that somebody really benefits from your input and suggestions by putting it to good use to make some cash.
With the Twitter API, you can create search for your ad,
then robo-click it… total fraud but you know its coming.
With all the twitter ad networks coming up, you know many of them will not scrub clicks at all…
just like what is happening with the robo-clicks at facebook.
Well this is great info I just star to grow my blog a few months ago and I hope to start monetizing my web site and in particular case of twitter just for info here in Panama Central america twitter is getting a lot of fans so this site will be bigger and bigger every single day
Interesting stuff…just signed up with SocialSpark and will give it a whirl. I may try to play with this concept and combine in with TweetBorder, which forces retweets in exchange for viewing premium content.
I have been trying to make money for the longest with twitter. I didn’t know ther was a such thing as sponsor twitter
cool…hope I can do the same thing too
Great Information…I’m sure that I can take an advantage of this…
sorry of you addressed this and i missed it – but is twitter ok with this according to their terms of service?
Umm I dont think they can regulate what you can and can’t say
They absolutely can regulate paid promotional ‘tweets’ if it’s in their terms. I haven’t looked through their terms yet, but if it is, it would be a good way of getting your account canned. Didn’t Digg do the same thing when it came out that some were being paid for their posts?
If I were going to try this, I wouldn’t use an account I care about I guess. (assuming I’m the guy tweeting).
wrong
Shoe,
While you are amazing at thinking of that. I tried a similar scenario and was told by Ted Murphy, IZEA CEO, that it was NOT allowed. You can only drive traffic through your accounts and not buy it through other venues.
1 – as mentioned many times I am on the board of advisers to Izea and meet at their headquarters several times a year.
2 – I was told specifically by Ted Murphy it was allowed as long as it contained the #spon hashtag.
3 – Always check with them before trying this.
I’m finding it hard to qualify for some of the better paying CPC offers on SocialSpark. The way they describe the qualifying factors is pretty vague. Anyone have any tips?
Yeah, I don’t even qualify for the Blu Frog one. Anyone else able to qualify for it?
I have been using Social Spark for awhile but have never really used them regularly. I’m oding it this month and have made about $10.00 this month.
The only problem I have is they seem to be WAY too picky about hwich clicks are fraud and which are not.
At times you wonder at the number of opportunities there are to make money online. I had been using Social Spark but never really got serious with it because of their approval system.
But this is amazing.
Funny you talked about the twitter advertising network. We are in the process of wrapping up just such a service.
I’m a long time follower and we would love nothing more than to have your input on what we’re doing and any ideas would be done.
We’d also like to talk about partnering if your agreement would allow you to be on our board or as an adviser.
You’re Gold
How did the pay per tweet works exactly m8?
Mary,
It’s going to be an advertising network where advertisers (companies) can post things they would like to tweet and publishers (tweeters) can get paid to spread the message.
We are opening it up for beta tonight or tomorrow, so stay tuned.
Absolutely nice job, I started twiting some months ago, and got little success in my posts in twitter. I cannot imagine how to get money for twitting and how to spend so much time in this social network. Actually your idea is good, but really will need much time for this.
Aww watching the word Arbitrage brings me back to the good old days of Arbitraging Adwords.. Nice stuff you shared Jeremy!
I haven’t had much luck with twitter so far, but maybe I just need to rethink my strategies. Thanks for the info.
$200 for 5 days? are you kidding me?
I have to try that
$200 for 5 days ..Hummmm
Jeremy, do you think I can do a guest post about missed opportunities? I mean, I sold TwtAd (now RevTwt) for what they make back in about a week now. lol.
Not to mention all the new advertisers you are driving there with this post…
“Notice to Izea/PayPerPost Affiliates: There are too many PPP ads. New ads for PPP will be delayed unless you choose CPC above $0.15. We will on”
Anyone running PPP4 ads right now should make sure their info still shows up in the Social Spark system. Mine has disappeared and the PPP4 opp seems to be gone. Pause your RevTwt ads now before you lose more money!
Yes, I noticed the same thing mari. I’ve just submitted a support issue with Izea to see what the problem is.
I’ve gotta be honest, I’m not impressed by the ethics of Izea/SocialSpark so far. They won’t disclose their “scrubbing” techniques and mysteriously remove ads that people have valid clicks on without any explanation.
Have you received a reply yet? I have not and I’m pretty peeved!
Hey Mari, yes I did. This is what Izea Support replied –
“When Account Management creates an Opportunity for an advertiser, they default the expiration to a year out. However, many advertisers don’t actually keep their Opps up that long.
Even if an Opp is yanked, though, you will still get paid for your verified clicks.”
So then I asked “where can I view the verified clicks from an expired Opportunity?”
But no response yet…
I definitely think its a loophole that closing as we speak, nothing long term, but worth a shot for
someone putting together some startup money.
this is really interesting ( if it is according to Twitter rules ). I have always seen Twitter as a community, which concentrates on the useful information sharing. I`ll research this opportunity in deep.
Is that true we can use all metode to earn money by online ?
Excellent! I have not had much luck with twitter so far, but maybe with your info and with a little time can do it. Thanks;)
Jeremy,
just one practical question:
1. Did you open a new account for your ads or did you write them on your normal account or what?
I heard that selling Tweets is the new big thing.
arbitraging Twitter traffic seems SCAM to me shoe …
Here’s what IZEA had to say about using this method:
“Thank you for your interest in our CPC program. We truly appreciate your enthusiasm! However, we have noted that you obtained many clicks for your CPC Opportunities from an outside marketing platform, http://revtwt.com which is in violation of our Terms Of Service sect. 3.8.
Please note that IZEA is committed to maintaining authenticity and quality in all of our programs by enforcing disclosure and providing freedom of voice. We have found that much of the traffic from third parties is low quality, lacks disclosure and comes from Twitter accounts that are less than desirable.
We are open to working with publishers that want to resell our links who agree to meet our criteria. Please feel free to view this post on our Blog for additional information and don’t hesitate to reach out with additional questions or concerns.
For now you have been suspended from the Affiliate Server in SocialSpark. This means you are no longer able to take Cost Per Click or Cost Per Action Opportunities until we understand your intent moving forward. Also, any CPC/CPA Opportunities you were currently participating in have been ended and any fraudulent clicks that have come from this site that have not yet been paid, will not be.”
So, that was a waste.
your a couple weeks late to the party…. and like i said make sure you get permission from them first
What are you talking about “a couple weeks”? You posted this 1 week ago. We got mass-blasted this notice today, referring to some obscure sub-paragraph in their T&C’s, which most likely didn’t exist at the time…
Indeed, I read the TOS before conducting my own experiment and don’t recall seeing anything that would prohibit this kind of activity. I started the experiment on the day of this post.
Ditto. I started just a few hours after this post. I believe they are invoking a vague “but not limited to” clause and considering using revtwt as “fraudulent clicks.”
Looks like they don’t like arbitraging.
“Thank you for your interest in our CPC program. We truly appreciate your enthusiasm! However, we have noted that you obtained many clicks for your CPC Opportunities from an outside marketing platform, http://revtwt.com which is in violation of our Terms Of Service sect. 3.8.
* blah blah * removed blah blah *
For now you have been suspended from the Affiliate Server in SocialSpark. This means you are no longer able to take Cost Per Click or Cost Per Action Opportunities until we understand your intent moving forward. Also, any CPC/CPA Opportunities you were currently participating in have been ended and any fraudulent clicks that have come from this site that have not yet been paid, will not be.”
Just got the same. Shoe, maybe somebody at Izea should be told that you’re on their board of advisers!
Sweet, I just got my SocialSpark account suspended due to following the advice in this post.
Quote:
> Thank you for your interest in our CPC program. We truly
> appreciate your enthusiasm! However, we have noted that you obtained
> many clicks for your CPC Opportunities from an outside marketing
> platform, http://revtwt.com which is in violation of our Terms Of Service sect. 3.8.
Please note that #spon was included in every tweet. So, what’s the deal?
Since IZEA was the advertiser in this case, they don’t want to pay out…
I was pissed when their link went all infinite loop … now this. I very unhappy.
But the idea is still a good one. Just need to find a more reliable business partner than IZEA. Their website is pretty. Their ethics, less so.
Their reporting also sucks. I can’t believe a software update caused last week’s “outage.” I am a Web developer and we don’t rollout updates w/o testing and if a bug does slip by, it doesn’t go unfixed for days.
Revtwt only shows ~4,500 RAW clicks for me before I paused my campaign. That includes clicks they didn’t even let through to the landing page, the number SS saw should be even less. Yet, this morning they reported over 6,700 invalid clicks for me and NOW? 59,626!!
I’m much more impressed with revtwt and their response time and support, even if their interface is a little basic. However, it would be nice to know which clicks they considered valid.
It is beyond me why Twitter and other Social Networking sites do not already aggregate the quality user-generated content being created, display it in an easy to understand and locate manner, and offer businesses highly targeted ppc advertising opportunities.
I wrote about this long ago – and even mentioned that StumbleUpon almost had the content display function optimized (before eBay changed it). See the post linked to this comment for more details.
“Thank you for your interest in our CPC program. We truly appreciate your enthusiasm! However, we have noted that you obtained many clicks for your CPC Opportunities from an outside marketing platform, http://revtwt.com which is in violation of our Terms Of Service sect. 3.8.
Ouch, I was just checking out why I got kicked from the program. I’m going to take some advice from some of you other users after I get some sleep!
so funny! ur life is amazing!collector-solar.com
I bought $100 worth of clicks from Facebook ads that were highly targeted to what one of the CPC advertisers were looking for but but NOT ONE click was counted as a valid click. Come on… that is just ridiculous.
Hmmmmm
that metode is really can earn money
I must try if it work
Thank’s for sharing Shoe
This is just sad. Jeremy you had one of the only web marketing blogs on the net that had authenticity and credibility. I would always refer people to your blog for real info opposed to the spamfest that most web marketing are. This post was such a blatant promotion and pile of disinformation that it haas hurt your credibility probably more than you think. I’m positive you’ll continue to be successful and make money, but I feel bad that one of the actual useful sites has turned into just another infomercial. What’s next jeremy, selling Sham Wows?
John
So now there are tremendous ways of monetize your twitter account.
Boy this product is really rocking one and I am sure this will keep rocking in coming days as well.
I wrote about this long ago – and even mentioned that StumbleUpon almost had the content display function optimized (before eBay changed it). See the post linked to this comment for more details.
i really enjoy going through your blog and i’ve been watching from a distance but felt the need to comment to let you know. keep it up. Do you have a RSS feed? I just got bloglines and want to add it in there.
I feel this – this was not a joke.
Well they said it was a problem with their software update last week and now it is “fixed.” However, I now have 1/3 the pending clicks I had before and double the invalid ones! I was under the impression that once a click was reported as pending, it had passed Click Forensics.. but either there are more problems with the site or they have scrubbed my clicks down even more.
35 valid clicks, for 6700 invalid ones? I paid for 427 clicks on RevTwt. Before SS stopped reporting, I had 119 pending clicks and about 2700 invalid. Obviously, a ton more clicks have been added and a ton removed.
There was some latency in the reporting of pending clicks and it started to pick up a few days into the campaign. If the ratio stayed the same, I figured, I was going to lose $9 or so, but not a big deal.. I was CPC bottom feeding on the RevTwt side. But this is not worth the effort, IMO if Social Spark is going to be so picky with valid clicks and continue to have problems. For instance, I took another opp and the twitter link was invalid, it was an endless redirect. I submitted a ticket, but no response still.
I was monitoring my click stats the whole time and it always seemed that SS reported as pending/valid around the same number of clicks I had coming from twitter.com/XXXX pages.. ie, only a twitter member page. It could be just a coincidence tho.