You see high-follower accounts and career tweeters in your feed all the time. They all make money on Twitter, so what’s stopping you?
Twitter is a goldmine. Learn how to leverage it, and you build engagement that leads to relationships.
Relationships start to yield opportunities. Opportunities widen your following and drive sales.
Your following can pay your bills (in due time) with the right framework. Let’s break it down.
Create an Engagement-Worthy Profile
Profile visits are your analytical markers for success. The more profile visitors, the better chance you have to create a following you can sell to.
You need a profile that reflects:
- Who you are
- How you provide value
- What value you provide
- When you provide it
- Why someone should follow you
Let’s look at an example of what that looks like.
Justin Welsh provides everything you need to know why you should follow him.
1. He tells you who he is right away, “The Diversified Solopreneur”
2. He describes how he provides value, “Tweets and threads about the process,” as well as “business growth tip”
3. His newsletter line also describes the value he provides, “1 business growth tip each week”
4. He describes when he provides it.
5. He describes why you should follow him. He’s growing a business, and wants to take you along for the ride
If you can’t provide immediate reasons for someone to follow you, your following will stagnate.
Monetize Your Twitter With Your Banner
Your banner is free ad space. We mentioned that profile visitors are a metric for success; this is where it plays out.
Let’s look at a great example of this.
Arvid Kahl tweets about building an audience, and appropriately, finding your following.
His entire model is centered around monetizing a following in an ethical, respectful way.
People want value. They don’t want to be sold to. Pay close attention to his banner.
It shows his products, but it doesn’t tell you to buy them. There’s no pushy information. All it says is “Learn. Teach. Repeat.”
He provides value without shoving products down your throat. He tweets about being respectful to your followers, and in turn respects his followers on his profile. It’s clear as day.
Find an ethical way to market products or services on your Twitter profile banner.
It costs advertisers $3-$10 per 1,000 views for a single online ad.
20,000 profile views a month is the equivalent of $60-$200 in free advertising.
By the way, that’s just the cost for impressions, not clicks. The average cost-per-click is $2-$4 for some verticals.
Imagine you get even just 100 clicks from those 20,000 impressions. That’s $200-$400 (minimum) in CPC advertising.
It’s thousands of dollars per year in free advertising. The more you scale your profile, the more you save.
Tweet About What You Do
What experience do you have that can help others?
The cold hard truth about Twitter (and social media in general) is that people only care about what can help them.
If your tweets don’t provide them with actionable information, they aren’t going to engage with you.
No engagement means no growth. However, people aren’t going to magically flock to your tweets.
Tweeting about what you do builds topical authority. If your profile offers value to marketers, make your tweets about marketing, and so on.
Tweets and replies are two entirely different ball games for building engagement. Let’s talk about the power of replying to other tweets.
Reply to Big Accounts
You have 100 followers. You follow someone in your industry with 10,000 followers.Turn on tweet notifications for that account, and reply to them as quickly as possible. The faster you reply, the better.
Expand on their idea. Share a personal example of how the information they provide is important to you.
Those tweets are already getting a ridiculous number of impressions. Bigger accounts are on an exponential ramp to keep getting more followers.
Pop up in the replies, and their core audience will see you. They’re the ones that are most likely to expand on the comments and really eat up those tweets.
Make it a habit to reply to these larger accounts, and followers will roll in.
Provide Results
Are you an SEO whiz? Post campaign charts as proof of your success.
Did you make $100K by selling on Amazon? Great. Show people the (redacted) receipts.
People care about results. They want to emulate results, because let’s face it: the hard work that leads to results isn’t sexy.
To build a successful following and line them up as perfect customers, you have to give them a reason to emulate you.
Capture Their Attention
Social media platforms are excellent. Twitter may be the greatest of them all.
But those followers you have aren’t actually your followers. Not yet.
They like what you do, they follow you for a reason, but if you vanished off of Twitter tomorrow, they’re not going to come looking for you.
At least, not many of them. Far less than 1%.
That’s not a detriment to you; they found Twitter first, but your profile and presence is a feature of the social platform.
You need to convert. You need a newsletter.
Newsletters are the only true way to capture your audience, and have a pool of individuals who know, like, and trust you. Our previous example of Justin Welsh shows that over 28,000 people subscribe to his newsletter.
That’s an insanely valuable core audience. You can do the same.
Whether it’s sponsored newsletter ads, promoting goods, or talking about the products you’ve made, your newsletter subscribers are the prime audience to sell to.
Ten to One: The Selling Rule
There is nothing wrong with asking. A tweet about your course or book can help drive sales without directly saying “Please buy my book.”
Talk about it. Retweet positive reviews. Explain the process.
There’s a thousand ways you can sell something without being direct and point blank about it.
Tweets that revolve around or pertain to selling your own products shouldn’t be most of your tweets. Follow the ten to one rule.
For every ten tweets that provide value to someone (without selling to them), you’re allowed one tweet that focuses on selling your product.
Make Money From Twitter Through Engagement
To recap:
- Make a profile that people want to follow
- Use your banner as an ad space for yourself
- Develop a useful product for people in your niche
- Provide results and social proof
- Capture their attention through email newsletters
- Provide 10x more actionable value than anything else
Twitter growth is exponential. If you engage intelligently and focus your efforts, your following can take off in no time.
We designed Engagement Builder to help you authentically engage with your community and remove the mess of the Twitter timeline all at once.
Building an audience on Twitter takes time. It’s easier to focus on making money when you cut out distractions to create the results you crave.
Play the long game. Market yourself, show your results, and others will want to be just like you.
Make Money From Twitter FAQs
Does Twitter Pay You for Followers?
No, Twitter does not pay you for followers. Your following can earn you money through multiple ways, including sponsored tweets, but there is no direct compensation by Twitter for your following size or engagement rate.
Does Twitter Pay for Tweets?
No, Twitter does not specifically pay for tweets. If you’re contacted by a company for a sponsored brand deal, you may be paid to Tweet about a certain product or service by them. Keep in mind that this can hurt your following if sponsorships are too frequent. Sponsored tweets are generally part of a larger social media campaign as well, and won’t likely just include Twitter.
How Many Followers Do You Need to Make Money on Twitter?
Audience quality always outclasses audience size. Even if you only have a few hundred Twitter followers, you can begin earning money. The more quality followers you gain, the more you can expect to earn for your efforts.
This post is courtesy of Cavalier Creative Media.