Making money on Twitter, like most of the web these days, is a multi-step process. First you have to develop credibility. You do this by giving a lot of great and useful content for starters. It helps if you have a large number of Followers. Not only will more people see your Tweets, but people feel that those with many Followers have more value to offer. You need to develop a strong Brand. It's important that you focus very tightly. Being many things to many people may reflect a diverse and well-balanced personality, but it doesn't help you build a powerful Brand. Stick to your subject. If you have many interests and areas you want to promote, create separate Twitter accounts for each one.
Developing credibility is only the first step. Next you have to develop trust. You do this by sending your Followers to valuable information that's FREE. That's how you develop trust. Few people will buy from you if they don't trust you. And trust has to be EARNED on the web. There are too many scam artists polluting the waters. It takes time to develop your Follower's trust. Interacting with them and helping is important. But if you have a really large list, like mine, that can be difficult. You do what you can, but it's impossible to respond to everyone's DM.
Now that you've developed credibility, an appealing Brand personality, and trust, you can start planting the seeds for sales.
Anyone who tells you selling on the web is "push button easy" is scamming you. It's not. It takes work. It take time. And it takes knowledge.
Once you have a large list, which is not difficult to get, you can get a lot of clicks to affiliate pages and your own sales pages. But in my experience you don't get a lot of sales this way from Twitter. With the right sales page, you can get a fair number of conversions from Ad Words or Facebook Ads. Easily enough to get your campaigns to pay off with a tidy profit. But Twitter is different. People will go, but they won't buy. Ad Words gets clicks from buyers. Twitter gets clicks from shoppers. Or not even shoppers, people who are looking for free information. So to turn Twitter Followers into buyers, you need to give them what they want - FREE INFORMATION. Lots of free information. In a series. The end of that series is the offer and the close. The traffic is free, unlike Ad Words. But it takes more work and time to create the sales. The sales are there. But they take a multi-step process to get there. Each step of the process continues to build credibility, likeability and trust. It also builds desire for the product and a recognition of their need for the product. By the end of the series, they're rabid buyers.
In general the web has moved to more of a multi-step process like this anyway. So you might as well get used to it. I don't know how many people have had any success sending people straight to an affiliate sales page. I haven't. It would be nice if making sales were that easy. In my experience, you need to do a lot of pre-selling before you send anyone to an affiliate sales page if you want to see high conversions.
One of the best ways to monetize Twitter is to send Followers to a squeeze page with an irresistible free offer. Then use auto-responders and more valuable free information to build to the final sale. You can also use Twitter to send Followers to your blog which has a squeeze page with the valuable free offer. There are still a lot of people who believe selling on the web and through Twitter is "push button easy". I see a lot of people selling this type of thing. I know that's what people want to believe. Who wouldn't? But this disengenuous pitch misleads, hurts and disappoints a lot of people.
You CAN make money on the web. And Twitter is ONE of many tools to help you do that. But be realistic. Don't be mislead. Be prepared to work hard. Be prepared to spend time. Be prepared to learn. And be prepared to spend money on training from real experts and spend money on advertising and Pay Per Click before your lists reach a substantial size.
I wish I could tell you that there's a magic pill or special formula and that once you have it it's "push button easy". But there isn't.
It takes time. It takes work. And it takes knowledge. Pretty much like anything else in life.
If you want to see my Twitter page it's:
http://www.twitter.com/studio525
Best of success,
Peter
