I’ve been using Twitter since 2008 and haven’t found an effective way to make money on Twitter despite having hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers, I lack the ability to make money through Twitter!
Making Money on Twitter is Difficult!
I’m an SEO expert (I’m VERY good at SEO) and have built websites which generated hundreds of millions of free organic search engine visitors over the past decade or two. It’s a simple money making SEO marketing formula, generate a lot of free Google traffic and some of that Google traffic converts to product sales or paying for a service: it works well for me, the home I own in the UK was paid for in under 5 years thanks to free Google traffic and the free visitors clicking AdSense ads on some of my websites.
In comparison, though I fully understand how Twitter ORGANIC engagements works (I could argue I’m a Twitter marketing expert in regards to free Twitter impressions and getting free Twitter followers), my Twitter accounts can generate well over 10,000,000 Twitter impressions a month, but actually converting millions of Twitter impressions to a sale or action with monetary value has been problematic, making money from Twitter is hard!
See my Brexit Politics @brexit_politics Twitter accounts impressions screenshot below for how easy it is to generate millions of Twitter impressions. That Twitter politics account hasn’t made me any real money, I’ll have made a little cash from Google AdSense on the website the Twitter account links to/promotes, but it’s hardly worth bothering with!
One of my SEO marketing Twitter accounts generated 571,400 Twitter impressions over a 91 day period (first 3 months of 2020), that’s 6,300 Twitter impressions a day. If we consider a Tweet like an ad, that’s something I shared on Twitter was theoretically viewed by 6,300 people everyday for 91 days. To buy this level of ad exposure on a social media network isn’t cheap, if I had to pay 1 cent a Twitter ad impression, that would cost me $63 a day, BUT it only generated 417 clicks from Twitter, that’s just 5 link clicks a day at over $12 a click!
Note: To be fair not all the Tweets on the SEO marketing Twitter account had a link to my website, probably around 40% have links and it would be silly to promote SEO Tweets with no link to a website where an SEO service could be sold to the Twitter visitor.
Even with a 1% conversion rate on my website that’s just 4 conversions over 91 days.
If I was selling houses for $500,000 each say, that’s a bloody good conversion rate from free Tweets: would have cost me nothing for $2,000,000 in house sales- kerching, but alas the Tweets aren’t promoting high value products/services, (they promote articles like this one) so at best we are looking at a few hundred $s of value over 3 months!
Building Twitter followers is easy (though time consuming), managing a Twitter account is easy (time consuming), generating lots of Twitter impressions isn’t too difficult, converting Twitter impressions to some sort of sale/service conversion is ridiculously hard!
How to Waste Time Trying to Make Money on Twitter!
I first wrote this Twitter marketing article over 10 years ago, have regularly added updated information, for example I rewrote the entire article in April 2020 after deciding to re-target it at specific Google search phrases Can You Make Money on Twitter and Make Money on Twitter because the article was ranking top 20 in Google for those two search phrases.
Like I said above, I’m VERY good at SEO, after re-targeting this article I’m hoping to see this article top 10 for those two Google SERPs. On April 5th 2020, this webpage was ranked 19th for Can You Make Money on Twitter and 18th for Make Money on Twitter which won’t generate any free Google traffic.
If I can gain those SERPs I could in theory convert them to a Twitter service or Twitter product, but I don’t have one. Despite my inability to make money on Twitter I seem to do OK generating Google SERPs related to Twitter, the article Get Free Twitter Followers ranks high in Google for lots of relevant searches like get 10,000 followers Twitter free: that one longtail keyword SERP generates about 40 Google visitors a month.
I get far more traffic to this website from that one article about getting free Twitter followers than all my SEO marketing Twitter accounts combined: they have around 100,000 Twitter followers combined!
Making money via Twitter traffic has for the most part been a waste of my time. If I didn’t love testing new ways to generate traffic and make money online I’d have given up on Twitter 10 years ago. Pretty much all my Time on Twitter marketing has been about experimenting to see if I can generate a lot of Twitter impressions/engagement to convert it to money and everything I’ve tried has been a failure (failed to make money).
- If the goal was build a decent Twitter following, I’m a success.
- If the goal was get millions of Twitter impressions a month, I’m a success.
- If the goal was promote a political ideology on Twitter, I’m a success.
- If the goal was promote a brand on Twitter, I’ve had minor success.
- If the goal was make money via Twitter, I’ve failed miserably.
Make Business Connections via Twitter
Maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way.
In 2019 I came close to snagging a multi-millionaire (maybe a billionaire) SEO client via a Tweet.
I watch The Profit with Marcus Lemonis and decided to SEO review some of the websites of businesses from The Profit and I reviewed the Marcus Lemonis website from an SEO perspective, it had plenty of SEO mistakes: still does in April 2020 despite a big makeover.
When I write articles (like this one) I try to add multiple images for SEO reasons, images make Google SEO a lot easier. I like to reuse content and every image on this site has it’s own little webpage and one of those webpages was associated with the image below (click the image to go to the webpage).
The image shows title tag SEO and branding errors on the Marcus Lemonis website: the mistake has since been fixed. Like I said, I like to reuse content and those image webpages are also shared on a Twitter schedule to my SEO relevant Twitter account and when the above image was shared on Twitter, Marcus Lemonis noticed it, followed my @SEOGoldUK business Twitter account and replied to the Tweet about the SEO mistakes on his website.
I failed to convert the Twitter nibble to a big bite, but an SEO client like Marcus Lemonis could’ve taken up all my SEO time: he has interests in a LOT of businesses and they have websites and I can 100% guarantee they all have SEO mistakes I can fix- that’s a potential full-time SEO job.
For example I reviewed his Camping World RV Sales website and it’s a case study of SEO feckups: embarrassingly stupid SEO errors like blocking content from Google indexing via the robots.txt file! Even more embarrassing I reviewed the Camping World RV Sales website 6 months ago and none of the SEO mistakes (some are huge SEO errors) have been fixed: that’s bad!
Maybe as an SEO expert I should use Twitter for trying to connect with more business people like Marcus Lemonis rather than chasing masses of Twitter impressions which convert poorly to product sales/services?
Twitter Marketing Conclusion
As of April 2020 I have almost 40,000 Twitter followers on my personal Twitter account yet still no decent Twitter monetization, I might as well have 4 followers. I have Twitter scheduling working on multiple accounts, have tested promoting affiliate products over Twitter (half a million impressions a month on those Twitter tests = few sales) and must be generating 10,000,000 impressions a month now!
I own two dozen Twitter accounts, most have over 10,000 followers, (probably have 250,000+ Twitter followers now). I use some of them for scheduling Tweets, others (most) aren’t used at all because it’s not worth my time to build Twitter schedules for them. I find Twitter is good for brand/message building (especially political messages), but not for making money directly (at least not for low value products/services): SEO is far better for making money.
If anyone ever wanted to buy Tweets from me to promote a political message or to promote a brand I could make some serious cash, but I find Google SEO marketing far more lucrative.
I’m afraid I’m a failure at making money on Twitter despite accounts totalling around 250,000 followers.
Would be very interested to hear how others are using Twitter to make money, if you can make money from Twitter you are doing better than I am?
David Law
Website - SEO Gold Services
Twitter is squidoo 2 that is, salesmen selling salesmen; or, myspace 2 cool people hanging out (draining productive time I could be making money).
Traffic does not convert in my experience but maybe I am wrong and someone is a Twitter millionaire. I am open to Twitter if it can yield income, very open.
I have over 2,500 followers on Twitter (as of August 2009) and made just 27 tweets with most linking to my theme site, not just to the themes for sale, but good info page like a free WordPress SEO tutorial. I have not noticed an increase in sales, I wouldn’t with only 4 visitors from Twitter this month and my Twitter page is a PR3!
Nice waste of PR!
Yesterday made a Tweet about my first free AdSense only theme. No traffic from that and with all those followers you’d expect a few click thrus. Looks like 99% of people who use Twitter are trying to sell/promote something, well I’m not looking to buy anything via Twitter and I don’t have the time to send out loads of Tweets, so waste of time so far.
Guess I could setup 20 or 30 automated Tweets, (have seen sites online offering the ability to send out Tweets) and forget about it. when I’ve looked at the Tweets I get from others 99.99% are from people trying to sell me something, pretty much SPAM the crap out of your followers!
David Law
David
Just getting into Twitter and you’re post helped so I’ll share something with you. You can’t force sales on places like Twitter. You need to get creative. Like this.
Around 2000 I was unable to work and turned in desperation to the adult end to make money. Easier said then done. Traffic was relatively easy to get back then but since there is so much free pron on the net converting it was tough, real real tough.
But like I said I was desperate which breeds inventiveness and I came up with a real winner. I didn’t sell much in the way of pron stuff but sold a ton of privacy software. It was a natural. You go on a pron site and all the sudden realize your computer is storing all the pron sites you are visiting and now you want it.
Now if I’d a stopped there I wouldn’t have made much. I wasn’t the first to think of this. There were plenty of adds for privacy software and none of them did much. But what I realized what that the want was there it was the landing. I mean why would you trust a popup on a pron site that wanted you to shell out dough for software. Not many suckers that dumb.
So what I did was find a legitimate privacy software that was willing to let pron sites push them and put up a banner ad that said “Same software that’s
available at Wal-mart, buy from the developer at a discount.” (All of which was true) So now they go from total mistrust to hey this looks legit, let me look into it. And I sold 1000s.
Cheers
@GoofingOffToday
i really love to use Twitter. i was addicted to Blogging before the birth of Twitter. Now i am addicted to Twitter.
i just love Twittering compared to blogging. i was a blog addict and now i am a Twitter addict.
Twitter is the newest craze today. i tweet at least 5 times a day on my friends just to keep them informed about my whereabouts. I still keep my personal blog though.
Hi David thank you for sharing your Facebook and Twitter adventures, I believe you do many things right and as you said the important thing is then to market to all those contacts and followers something interesting.
Now we all know that there are many good services and product out there and if you just put an articles with your link of the product or the services at the bottom I’m afraid you won’t do many sales because very few people buy at first glance, what I will suggest you is to always put a capture page or a squeeze page that offer something for free and then market to them with your autoresponder over the time.
The fortune is on the follow up and if you do all that effort to get all those followers make sure they are in your list so you can market to them and make real contacts.
sincerely,
Sergio Ervini
i love to Twitter my day to day activities to my friends and Twitter followers. Twitter is much better than blogging because it is direct to the point and does not require you to type so many unnecessary words.
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