I have updated the report 'How to Monetize Twitter'. Download your Free Copy.

If you are not familiar with it, 'How to Monetize Twitter' shows you how to make money using Twitter. I have added a new service and updated those that have changed their program.

Enjoy!

As I mention in my report 'How to Monetize Twitter', for those who want to make money off their Twitter Accounts, there are several options but the two key players are Izea through their Sponsored Tweets unit and RevTwt. There are others but of much less significance. Of late 'MyLikes' has joined the fray and seems to be making life difficult for the older more entrenched counterparts.

Izea has been dragging it's feet and has not been able to get enough advertisers on board to provide a consistent source of revenue for Twitter users. Izea's model has been different than RevTwt – it allows advertisers to sponsor a Twitter account at a predetermined dollar amount. The advertiser sends out a tweet to the followers of the account and expects a certain number of clicks in return. If the number of clicks generated are less than the expected amount, the advertiser re-sends the tweet a couple of more times at no extra charge. RevTwt on the other hand has been strictly pay per click. You tweet an advertisers message and you get paid by the number of clicks generated. The advertiser does not have to commit to a certain amount per Twitter account sponsored and pays strictly on the basis of clicks generated. RevTwt has been very regular in providing a steady stream of advertisers and Twitter users have been making a consistent albeit small amount of money using the RevTwt pay per click model.

In comes MyLikes with the Pay Per Click model like RevTwt. It has other bells and whistles but what matters to marketers is the revenue model. MyLikes has a Pay-Per-Click model very similar to RevTwt. It also offers a Pay Per Tweet model but few advertisers have taken to that. Where MyLikes has tilted the field in it's favor is through it's payment model. Izea pays you only when you accumulate at least $50 in your account. Can you imagine what a good funding source it is for Izea to hold on to other peoples money. I bet it funds a good percentage of their business. It's like free money for Izea. Izea does not have an abundance of advertisers and consequently very few people generate enough clicks to get to $50 in a year and many abandon their accounts. All that money stays with Izea.

RevTwt pays out once your account accumulates $20. A much better model than Izea.

MyLikes on the other hand pays out every Friday as long as you have more than $2 in your account, yes that is two dollars. You start seeing results, that is cash in your PayPal account very very quickly. Who do you think marketers are flocking to. I believe Izea's Sponsored Tweets had the lead but it took advantage of it's members through it's ridiculous payment model. Besides, it did not work hard enough to bring on board enough advertisers. RevTwt is holding it's own as it has done a better job of getting quite a few advertisers on board and the payment model is a bit more reasonable. It should consider lowering it's payout amount though to compete better. In the meantime, MyLikes has the momentum and it's competitors better scramble.

Feel free to post your comments and your thoughts below. Let's help each other out.

MyLikes is a startup launched by two ex Google Adsense and Adwords experts that encourages people to share with others what they like but with a commercial angle. Let's say you are active on Twitter or you have a website or blog. You join MyLikes and browse through the list of advertisers. If there is one that you like, you tweet about them to your Twitter followers or write about them on your blog / website. When people click on the link you provide, you get paid.

What you get paid depends on what the advertiser is willing to pay and / or what MyLikes determines you deserve to be paid. They determine that based on your influence within the social media communities using Klout, Topsy and others. The money you earn, you can donate to charity or keep it. They pay you every Friday as long as you have more than $2 of earnings.

MyLikes is a bit different than Izea's Sponsored Tweets which has been trying to commercialize social media based on the size of followers but has not been able to herd in enough advertisers to make a significant impact. On MyLikes, you can set up your profile which will showcase all your Likes – both the free and sponsored ones. Setting up a good profile allows advertisers to review what you and your audience may be interested in.

There is a built in deterrent to prevent you from tweeting just about anything to your followers. If you do that, not many of your followers will click on your links and your calculated influence will go down. That will lower the amount you are paid per click. Smart.

Let's hope MyLikes can have a more significant impact. The founders' Google credentials are certainly generating good press. In the long run, their success will depend on whether they can bring in enough advertisers or not.

Good Luck.

Najee

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It seems Twitter has strong armed Dossy's Twitter Karma and Huitter's Mutuality service out of providing the bulk unfollow function on Twitter. It was very useful for those trying to grow their Twitter following. You could bulk unfollow those who were not following you and fill those available slots with new followings hoping that some of them would follow you in return. This follow – wait a few days – bulk unfollow and then rinse and repeat worked very well for growing your Twitter following.

Well Twitter didn't like that and seems to have succeeded in blocking these two popular services from bulk unfollowing. What to do now? Unfollowing one person at a time is way too much work and you'll soon give up. Our preference is using services like TweetSpinner. They have a free and a paid version. Even the free version allows you to unfollow 20 people at a time with one keystroke. That's a lot better than manually unfollowing one at a time.

Their paid version is very smooth. You set your parameters and they unfollow in an automated fashion on a regularly scheduled basis. Once you set it, you don't have to be involved any more. It does it automatically.

TweetSpinner does not mass unfollow / bulk unfollow in one stroke but does so a few at a time all day long. This keeps Twitter at bay and also helps you grow your account. In addition to the bulk unfollow function, TweetSpinner also provides filtered following, smart tweets, scheduled tweets, rotating profiles and automated DirectMessages. Well worth the nominal monthly fee. Use my link and get a free one week trial.

Another service that can help is JustUnfollow. It presents you a list of those that don't follow you. You can unfollow them, one at a time. You cannot unfollow 20 at a time or 10 at a time. Only one at a time. But they are presented separately so you don't have to sift through.

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My book ‘Long John Twitter‘ (LJT) launched in May 2009 was received very favorably and helped me get familiar with all kinds of Twitter users. When I was writing LJT, I had the professional marketer and business person in mind. Over the last few months, I have noticed another kind of Twitter user that I wasn’t too familiar with – the student and the social media hobbyist. These two groups are joining Twitter by the droves but their reasons are very different than businessmen and professional marketers. These two groups, students and social media hobbyists primarily want to use Twitter for fun. However; while having fun, they do want to have some bragging rights and want to outdo their friends in the number of followers they have.

The original book ‘Long John Twitter‘ addresses the subject of acquiring followers and retaining them on a long term basis. But it is more of a marketing book and takes a more detailed approach to Twitter and it’s sister Apps. It is an overkill for those who want to get a quick 500 to 1000 or 2000 followers and show off a bit.

It is great to see the enthusiasm of this group jockeying for position and hopefully this report / booklet helps in getting those quick followers to brag about.

As this is an abbreviated version of the original book ‘Long John Twitter‘, I have named it LJT Lite.

There are several ways to follow people:

• Manual – that is one at a time

• Semi-automatic – that is a bunch at a time but initiated manually

• Automatic – you set up your parameters and the system / software follows people round the clock without any daily intervention from you.

• Outsource it – let some company do it for you as at LJT Get Followers service.

  Automatic and Outsourcing is out of the scope of this booklet as it is not intended for those who have a more ambitious agenda. We will however; cover manual and semi-automatic and use FREE services to do that.

This eBooklet is intended to help you build a decent base of followers. Whether you want to have 500 followers or 5,000 or more, the methods taught will keep you growing your followers. If you build a sizeable follower base, you can look into monetizing it but that is a different subject.

Good Luck!

A question that consistently comes up is 'Shall I have one Twitter account or two?'. My advice is two. Why?

Twitter is a very young organization with a very potent communication product that is free to use. So? That means marketers will try their best to exploit it to their advantage. There is nothing wrong with that. In fact that is what marketers are supposed to do. So what's the problem?

The problem is that there are always some unscrupulous people who will absolutely flood a network with all kinds of spam. To ward off such nefarious people, most organizations including Twitter start raising barriers and setting traps. Twitter being so young hasn't had much time to develop the knowledge base necessary to combat spam without hurting legit users. They try and keep coming up with rules that they think will trap spammers. They end up hurting legitimate users.

Spammers don't care if 200 of their Twitter accounts get suspended. Their automated systems churn out another 200 or more. But you and I care if our carefully nurtured account with 30,000 followers is all of a sudden suspended. For most legit marketers, Twitter is a great avenue for initiating a dialogue with prospects and communicating with customers. Educators have prepared all kinds of material to train marketers in building and retaining a loyal following. It is gut wrenching to see a carefully and painstakingly nurtured account getting suspended for no fault of yours. It just gets caught in the dragnet created for spammers and months of effort goes down the drain.

In recent weeks, Twitter has improved their support and if you file a complaint, quite often your account is restored. But till that happens, you feel defeated and on top of that embarrassed and red faced trying to explain to customers and followers why you have been suspended.

My suggestion would be to create two accounts instead of one and promote both. Instead of one account with 30K followers, you may end up with two with 15K each. You will loose some bragging rights but if one gets temporarily suspended you loose half your followers/following. It's called hedging your bets.

Long answer to a short question. I hope it helped.

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You can't live with Twitter, you can't live without. While Twitter is a very potent communication medium, organizationally, it is a chaotic company. Quite often it seems the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is up to. Most perplexing is Twitter's indiscriminate suspension of accounts. You will have a long standing account with thousands of followers and one fine day without warning of any sort, you'll find your account suspended. Why? Nobody knows. You may open a support ticket but all you'll get is a form letter listing 1500 reasons why you could have been suspended. You may reply to it and Twitter promises to respond within 30 days. In most cases they don't.

It happened to a few of our clients this weekend. They woke up Sunday to their accounts suspended with no explanation. This has happened previously also.

One can live with their slow network and their denial of service battles but the hardest to fathom is their irresponsible behavior in dealing with their users – the very people that have brought it fame. Twitter has grown at an unprecedented speed and organizationally they haven't caught on. It seems the people they have put in charge of keeping order within it's user base is disparate, don't talk to each other and probably implement rules that they other sub-sections have no clue about. The end result is destroying months of hard work that it's biggest champions have put in.

As Twitter's popularity has sky rocketed, many small companies have started developing supporting products around Twitter. Instead of rewarding these companies by making life easier for them, Twitter is giving them ulcers. If you read between the lines of the latest communiques from TweetSpinner and TweetLater, you get a feel that their frustrations are boiling over. No wonder TweetLater has changed it's name to Social Oomph and is coming up with services for status.net that will potentially be a very viable and robust alternative to Twitter.

Nobody likes their account suspended especially if they have 30,000 to 40,000 followers. We have started advising clients to have multiple Twitter accounts – just in case.

If Twitter wants to be a serious player in web 2.0, it must:

1. Notify users who may be in violation of one of it's numerous clear and phantom rules. Such notifications must be very clear and accurate and not a smorgasboard of 1500 items that could have been violated.
2. Send out warnings to offending parties and again be very clear as to what rule was violated.
3. Suspend accounts only when repeated warning are ignored.
4. Till it puts in place a solid mechanism of implementing 1, 2 and 3, Twitter needs to suspend it's belligerence.

If Twitter remains arrogant and inconsiderate, it will soon become a footnote like thousands of others that litter the I.T. graveyard.

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