Remember back when certain people were talking about how dumb twitter is and how stupid I was to be doing all kinds of contests to get followers? Well, it’s had a pretty good ROI!
From Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets I have made over $15,000.00 in the last 30 days and I am a pretty small fish in the twitter world. I only have 70 some thousand followers.
Here is my ad.ly account:
and Sponsored Tweets:
The really cool thing is lots of people are making great money with twitter advertising. Since ad.ly started I have heard from many people with < 5k followers like David who have gotten a couple hundred dollars for tweets here and there.
I have to admit the first time I got paid over $4000 for 1 tweet I was like… whoa how can that possibly back out for the company? I talked to Sean Rad, the CEO of ad.ly, yesterday and actually asked him that exact question.
Sean told me that they measure the goals with the advertisers very close and can tell how well the publisher gives a return to the advertisers. He said that with my account specifically I have a very responsive group of followers that generate thousands of clicks that give the advertisers great value.
Sean understands that without ensuring quality to their advertisers they will have nothing.
That also explains why I am making twice as much now as I was last month and the money keeps getting better. I just approved a tweet for almost $5,000 (doesn’t that seem nuts?).
One thing I find amazing is that the tweets are not very spammy and lots of time they generate a conversation. Such a win-win-win.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2412 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.
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{ 127 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow Jeremy, do you really think that 70000 followers are small one.
70000 can bring huge impact, do not forget reweet facts as well.
I wouldnt say 70k is a small number of followers but what shoe meant was that compared to the other big dawgs on twitter, he has quite limited number. When you said that 70k can make a huge impact, well it sure can but we are talking about targeted followers here. You can have 1 million uninterested followers earning you $10 while quality 100 followers might bring you $1000 at the same time.
70k is like a small city, thats pretty impressive when you think about it. That amount of money per tweet is simply mind blowing.
That’s the issue: numbers on Twitter bring impact. Impact drives sales. Impact creates momentum. Impact rocks!
Wow that is pretty crazy! Are these companies actually seeing a ROI on these tweet ads or are they just throwing money to experiment in new territory? What do you think the threshold is before frequency becomes irritating to followers? Or are they so ‘conversational’ that it doesn’t matter?
Awesome Shoe, now back to tweeting
Amazing! I guess the load of work is pretty much on the middleman (ad.ly and spon. tweets) because they dont want to give their advertisers a bad experience..
in the end, just having a big amount of followers isnt everything..
Awesome.
A more appropriate title would have been “How I make 15,000 a month”, cause not everyone is Jeremy… mere mortals can only hope.
That attitude is just silly =P
Not really Jeremy.
The fact that not everyone has your followship and its level of engagement is reality.
The fact that based on this followship, you made 15K. Is reality.
The actual “how to” is present in this small (but important) statement:
“Remember back when certain people were talking about how dumb twitter is and how stupid I was to be doing all kinds of contests to get followers? Well, it’s had a pretty good ROI!”
The rest are (well deserved) results!
Nevertheless, people should pay attention to their Twitter accounts, as this is still a “young” opportunity.
Ok well I dont disagree with that. I thought you were saying that I was the only person who could do this… lots of people are doing it that have much smaller following.
Reputation goes a long way with that as well. A ‘nobody’ with 70k followers may not be attractive to advertisers. I would assume they want to use influencers, not just your average Joe. On the other hand, I guess it would be difficult for an average Joe to get a huge following.
A post like this gets the 100million Shoemoney followers thinking “how can I get 1000′s of followers like Jeremy too” and the problem with that is they wont have anything like the engaged follower you have.
Your title is suggesting a procedure on how to actually do this. When really its more a case study on how you did it. You have a voracious following and the years I’ve been following you I can say with high confidence that probably 95% of them are people who dont make more than $200/month themselves.
So when they read this post and many like this that you write, they try it and dream of make $10k/month themselves. When really you started this blog way back in the day when some of us were commenting even back then http://www.shoemoney.com/2005/08/12/how-i-started-my-business#comment-234
*heads over to send links from all twitter apps to my twitter page* thanks shoe..;)
Crazy. There seems to be no end to ways to leverage advertising income on the internet. At least for those who are successful such as you are. Good work.
Interesting to see that sponsored tweets pays you only around 10% of what ad.ly pays….
Any good reason?
Obviously you did an excellent job of building an engaged audience! If it works for the advertiser definitely a win-win for everyone!
Nice. But how do you get payed. Did you actually get the money?
Yup you can do easy withdrawls to your paypal account 2 days after the tweet goes out.
Hey Shoe, nice work! This is actually the first real success story I’ve heard from Twitter. From an advertisers perspective it’s at least in the ‘I’ll give it a shot’ stage.
Is this a mass marketing move or are these advertisers looking for targeted twitter followers?
Congrats on your Twitter earnings. For each Tweet, you are pulling in about seven cents per follower. Not seven cents a click, but seven cents per follower !! As for myself, with 1200 followers, the best I have earned is $.002, this is two-tenths of a penny per follower. The explanation could be that my click-through rate is less, or that small Twitter accounts don’t draw the advertisers with big budgets. At any rate, I have lots of room to grow.
I hope you have a very happy day.
$5000 for just one tweet …. sounds like a good deal.
Perhaps worth trying if it doesn’t cost anything to sign up and use, but clearly with the abundance of Twitterers out there there must be a large ‘action’ response for a Twitterer to be able to earn any significant amount on a campaign, otherwise the sponsorship can’t be sustainable for a very wide base of ‘publishers’.
Impressive result for the Shoemonger – clearly in this case big man get big results. Now if only there were a method by which the subscribers get a share of the sponsored Tweets that they enable you to earn from, as as to share the wealth and love….
Looks like twitter has become somewhat of a “Super Bowl” ad rush… seems very “retarded” for advertisers to pay someone that much for a tweet that will most likely convert like shit… I don’t see this lasting for too long cuz eventually someone at these companies will have to be accountable for “blowing” this money..
Oh man… and to think I use to own the Shoemoney Twitter account. another kick in the balls lol
What price for a sponsored tweet though? What price on your word?
I see sponsored tweets as selling out hard.
It’s only selling out hard if you’ll shill for anybody over anything in your quest for the almighty dollar. If you’re getting paid to share your opinion about a product/service you believe in ( you know, the kind you’d tweet about for free anyway) then the money is just a bonus. The integrity situation here is about the same as for affilliate marketing, and probably more ethical than accepting AdSense ads; Google offers less control over what shows up on your pages, eh?
I’m already using Sponsored Tweets but haven’t signed up for ad.ly. Going to do that now!
I really like your blog and i respect your work. I’ll be a frequent visitor.
I like this. Because there are many people that freaked out about how lame twitter was. Now, before I get hung, let me explain.
Advertising on twitter can be like selling out, but where do you see people NOT getting money for advertising on space they manage? It’s NOT like giving a paid review of a product you don’t use, it IS like using space that you manage to make money with.
Giving up a tweet here and there to an advertiser that wants to gain the attention of your followers, is no big deal. IMO it’s like mentioning a product you used during a conversation with a friend, but you get paid to do so. I think it carries the same amount of weight. Your friend never has to know you were paid to tell him about a product face to face, it just can’t happen that way online with all the disclosure mumbo jumbo.
Now, I am not sure these networks are hoping for CTR, some people might follow but not login for weeks and won’t see the ad anyways. Just because you have 70k followers doesn’t mean a single one is going to click, but just because you buy a billboard in Time Square for a week, doesn’t mean everyone is going to look at it.
This is interesting, given that most people hardly click on links in tweets, it’s intriguing that one could make this much money.
I think I should up my game and stop tweeting for fun
Well i would agree with you when you said people dont click the links much but if you are talking about a person who has made a huge impact on the web; people tend to follow and check out your stuffs
That is pretty great for a month of sponsored Tweets. I would take $15,000 in a heart beat. Greg Ellison
I paid you $350 for 1 sponsored tweet and earned nothing in return, that’s how you make 15k/month tweeting:)
That’s pretty impressive. I’ve made a little from SponsoredTweets, but nothing yet from Ad.ly and I signed up about a month ago. Today I went in and lowered my price so we’ll see if that gets any action.
$15,000. That’d definitely help pay for my school
Think someone with around 1000 followers who tweets in a sports niche has a shot at making a few bucks. I signed up today just to check it out. I’m never against diversifying income streams.
Jeremy, you are so stinking inspirational.
Thank you for what you do!
Eric
I had few thousand followers.Never try out to monetize from it.Perhaps i need to start doing this.No doubt you are inspirational!
This is an awesome post, and quite amazing to be making $100k+ a year just off simple tweet ads.
The important thing to remember here is the followers to following ratio.
I’ve done a lot of tweet ads testing and the click rates are usually much higher when the followers/following ratio is extreme.
true that Zac, i realized that couple of months ago.
Hi,
Zac I would like to see your experiments with twitter, followers/following ratios.
At this rate it is easier to buy followers, it would still be a good rate of return.
Zac I did not know you read this blog.
Very impressive,
I had no idea there you could make money from twitter, but to make money you will need a massive twitter base to even have a chance of making money and that will take a long long time to build.
Why would an advertiser pay 4k + with ad.ly and not 400 with sponsored tweets?
Congratulatins on your accomplishment. But let’s get with reality.
The fact is that 93.6% of Twitter users have less than 100 followers and only 0.68% have more than 1,000 followers (“Inside Twitter ” Sysomos June 2009). So calling yourself a “small fish” is a huge understatement and makes earning that amount of money completely unrealistic for more than 99.3% of Twitter users.
So the question then becomes how much has this article helped your readers versus how much it’s helped you earn more money by promoting Sponsored Tweets through an affiliate link?
I think you’ve put out some solid content over the years but this one comes off as nothing but self-serving.
Ditto Kristof
The link to the report you mention at:
http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/
I’m not mad. Just disapointed since I think the greater majority of Shoe Content is very good.
It ain’t going to last so continue to make HAY while you can. Goals are fine and always encouraged. Providing they are realistic and reflect the realities of the marketplace!
Reminds me of the “Blind Clicks” craze where my buds at Standard Internet made MIllions untill advertisers finally woke up. Most of YOU have no idea what I’m talking about but thats ok. Or maybe you remember SI?
Hello Jeremy,
I have made more money from following your advice with Sponsored Tweets than anything I’ve done on the Internet so far besides me getting one sponsor for my blog. I continue to find more ways to make money from you and I was wondering how do you find that information because the work is so easy to do to just make a few clicks and like that, I’ve got cash!
I thank you for your knowledge and help and I hope to learn more from you in the future.
“I have to admit the first time I got paid over $4000 for 1 tweet I was like… woah how can that possibly back out for the company? I talked to Sean Rad, the CEO of ad.ly, yesterday and actually asked him that exact question.”
No, the answer is that it doesn’t back out on purely a $ basis. The advertisers are paying a premium to reach your audience…typically advertising on the internet is sold cpc/cpm with relatively little value given to the branding associated with the property. At $4000 per tweet Ad.ly is doing a heck of job selling the intangible value, unbelievable really. I have a feeling that that figure will invariably fall to a “happy medium”.
I signed up and haven’t been offered a single tweet.
Very nice bro. Thats what we are talking about man!
I think luck is a huge factor in Jeremy’s life. Its like 40-60, hard work – luck.
That’s inane.
i had no idea that it is possible to make any money with Twitter – thanks for sharing.
I think this will just blight Twitter and turn it into one big ball of spam. The search capabilities will become distorted and useless.
crazy stuff indeed..
Sounds great. I am giving it a go
Not bad!
I suppose the tricky part here is having that many followers. Isn’t? 70K followers is pretty impressive.
$5000 a tweet? Thats insane totally.
Jeramey,
Could you break it down in simple terms form how this works? Also how did you get all those followers?
Thanks for the info!
Rob
http://explosivelistsbuilding.com/
RobertChic.com
I’m gonna call this a pile of BS. While it’s true that Shoemoney may have made this much, the only reason he did is because Ad.ly is trying to lure as many users into signing up.
Only a crackhead/idiot would pay $4,000 for one tweet. Tweets are not very effective… and you won’t get that much traffic from them unless you have something that goes viral.
There are a lot of flaws with Ad.ly…. one being that Twitter could block them at any given moment. I can guarantee some form of punishment will be handed to anyone that uses them.. just like you can get your ass kicked if you use Text Link Ads.
If people are dumb enough to pay $4k for a tweet more power to them. But please, email me at swampland@florida.gov and I can give you a much better deal
WOW thats amazing.. but you should share some tricks how to get followers
if you’re famous and have influence like shoemoney… so it is possible to make more that $15k in a month just using twit ads network.
I feel a bit jealous with you Jeremy. I have participated in both sponsoredtweets and ad.ly but never received any offer. I learn from this and I know reputation is rather important than followers. Thanks
i think if Obama using ad.ly or sponsoredtweets, for sure he will be the next “internet famous guru”.
You can get targeted followers in an automated way each night and use specific keywords at the site http://twittgeek
You can also buy retweets to promote your music, book, band or yourself by going to http://retweet.it
These are two great ways to build and promote on twitter.
Hello from Russia!
Can I quote a post in your blog with the link to you?
Those figures are really interesting. But what I wonder is about the $4000 tweet. Can somebody pay so much just for a tweet?
Both of these ad networks are good but I have not been able to earn more than about $125 from both of them.
wow you are a fantastic marketer congratulations
I simply have no words i’m speachless about this numbers …
That’s preety good life.
That’s pretty good life.
Thanks for posting this. I have never heard of Ad.ly before. I just signed up too!
- Single Guy Money
It’s nice info, really help us to monetize our tweet activity. Thanks Jhoe, Nice to subscribe your site.
please can i do this here in west africa
I have to agree about Sponsored Tweets, they are awesome! I just signed up for http://ad.ly/ because never had heard of them before. I realize you have way more followers than myself (@brandyellen) with about 8900 followers, but any extra funds I can make the better! Thanks for this wonderful information!
hey,
I don’t get it, I’m with both ad.ly and sponsored tweets now for over a month and I’ve never got a hit,
how do you make it work?
please advise.
People are talking a lot about Twitter and how it can impact in a internet business. But few, in fact, understand how. Hope you’ve understood Jeremy.
$5000 by single sponsored tweets. Really great Sir, I am also getting offer from sponsored tweets but they are only giving me $1 for sponsored tweets.
So, is there a way to do this with status updates for Facebook Fan pages?
Damn, nice going Shoe. You will make a killing off this in a year.
Gosh, I cant believe I twitter has become this big. When John Chow told his readers to open twitter account, I ignored his advice. Now I have to play catch up.
i don’t know
Sponsored tweets is really great. I have already getting nice offer from advertiser but not much amount. But I am going to like this program.
Twitter has never been good for monetizing unless you pepper your followers with crazy lures and shortened url’s. It’s a great medium for distributing information and getting people interested in your email list, but that’s about it. People that spam my twitter account get unfollowed in a hurry.
Its amazing deal if this is really working but i think its too good to be true.Probably just another marketing campaign
Twitter has millions of worldwide visitors, it is great for my home business, but after reading your article I really need to ramp up my twitter marketing.
I am earning little bit from sponsored tweets. Recently I have got one mail from sponsored tweets that they give $1000 for highest sender twitter.
I didn’t think one could make any money on Twitter, I shall get an account for our business and see if we can make a little cash too.
Thanks for this post.
I am newbie on this business, as of now no tweet ads to promote. Hope to make money like you do.
Wow Jeremy, do you really think that 70000 followers are small one.
I would say its in the lower percentile… its all relative though.
I do have 1500+ followers on twitter and still now I hav earned only $1.37 using sponsored tweets and my sponsored tweets account is 6 mnths old
Any suggestions why i am unable to generate money thru sponsored tweets
ATUL
WOW
Its always good to hear something new from you
first read I think this impossible, but after read all of your article, this is reasonable and I want to practice and hope at least get half of you.
getting followers is not hard thing ?? do twitter ban accounts when account go lot of followers??
strange
With Ad.ly today we must have at least 5000 follower to participate in
Wow, This is motivating. I need to get more active on Twitter
I had no idea that it was possible to make so much money from using Twitter.
This is simply awesome. If I can get a piece of that money, I would be done for the year.
I feel truly inspired with your post.
So how much did they pay you for writing this article?
So I’m just seeing this and I went to ad.ly and it seems that they only deal with Celebs now. I don’t think that has always been the case or has it?
funny
unbelievable earnings from sponsored tweets…that sounds great
With Ad.ly today we must have at least 5000 follower to participate in
The new minimum is 25000
good
Nice! I use SponsoredTweets too and I must say that I’m really satisfied with this program and their performance and support. But I can join the market in Ad.ly because I have less than 25.000 followers
I hope I get there someday. I think that Ad.ly is better than SponsoredTweets in some points, more people recommend it and I find it more reliable. Well, this is just my opinion. Two main factors here are followers and your Twitter influence.
I certainly do not know that we can earn money through twitter, thanks for sharing, it is a new area where i need to concentrate, I m going to the website ad.ly
From my own experience, one affiliate mlm thing I had going (I did and still do really believe in it) was really bumming along for ages and I just couldn’t seem to get it going. I was one of the nay-sayers about Twitter in the way back when. Then I met a guy at a conference who explained to me how to work it. I thought, “Okay, I have a thing that doesn’t seem to be working and a system I’ve always thought must be a time-waster, I’ll marry these two devils off and see what happens.” Well, literally within a month I was on the leader board and I’m now using twitter mucho for all sorts of things and the evidence is there in the bank balance. It is not a quick fix and there’s a learning curve but i really think that this is the direction things are going, broadly speaking.
Wow Jeremy, does anything you touch not turn to gold. I once had a twitter farm that collectively had nearly half a million followers. Made a killing with RevTwt and Sponsored Tweets.
That was a year ago now and boy have Twitter cracked down!
Most of my accounts got banned but I do still make over a hundred dollars every week!
Great blog! I am starting a e commerce business but would love to have some extra money by tweeting. What do I do and how do I do it?
Thanks!
First of all i have to admit,that i will have to go over and over again to understand this to the fullest and have the same implemented into my blogs.
But there is not a tinge of doubt that you have come out with many a value lessons for all bloggers to unleash the full potential of Twitter
How do i get stared twitting like that.
the power of twitter may seem from the osama dead news is start from twitter and it spread so fast.
And now you will know that you adv and your blog sharing will tweet how fast if it interesting.
Twitter still got 20MM of active user, make use of it.
Ad.ly seems to be paying higher then Sponsored Tweet…hmm…!
I wish this could work for me.. I barley get response on twitter.
Interesting but unbelievable…I am going to try and check it out…
Sure but anyone can build a reputation too.
Again its all relative.
Well I can agree with that. I can build my rep now but the question is how long would it take
. I can pull it off anyways if i know my things well, but it might not be twitter time anymore! anyways thanks for the share!
I was just going to say about what the original commenter said (hopefully a little agreeably).
Specifically, I was going to say was that even if I got 70k followers I would find it hard to believe I could make $15k that easily… that is, without all the experience and community you’ve built Jeremy.
But… but but but… I’m taking it as inspirational as “Look what you can do once you have the trust of a large community.”
Which is very, very cool!