5 Ways to Make Money with Your Twitter Account

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Twitter is a key part of any social media marketing campaign.

However, you don’t have to have a blog in order to make money through Twitter.

There are several ways that you can make money through the social network without trying to sell your own products or services.

Twitter is a powerful platform unto itself, not just a conduit for marketing another site. You can create a Twitter account around a profitable niche — making money online, online education, or motherhood, for example — and amass a large number of followers interested in that niche. Then you can tweet links to interesting content from around the web, offering your followers something of value without ever having to create content yourself.

So how do you make money? The same way you do on a blog: Selling advertising, sponsored links, and affiliate marketing. Here are a few programs that can help you make money on Twitter:

#1. Sponsored Tweets

Sponsored Tweets is a well-known ad service for Twitter allows you to set your own price-per-click for ads that you tweet. You can choose the ads you tweet from a list of available ads that are updated regularly. You must have at least 50 followers, 100 tweets, and an account that is at least 60 days old to sign up for this service.

#2. MyLikes

MyLkes is an extensive ad platform can be used on Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, and your blog. You get to choose ads from thousands of advertisers, and you get to schedule the time the advertisement will be tweeted from your account. You can earn as much as $0.42 per click, and you can get a payout weekly.

#3.  Ad.ly

Ad.ly is another ad service that lets you send out advertisements in your tweets. However, you don’t get paid-per-click. Instead, you create a profile of your interests, then advertisers can choose your account to publicize a campaign. You agree to send out a specific number of tweets on a specific schedule, and you get paid a lump sum.

#4. Rev Twt

Rev Twt is a  Twitter-based advertising service and is a pay-per-click platform. The more followers you have and the higher reputation you have, the greater access you will have to higher-paying campaigns. Payout is made via Paypal when you have reached $20 in earnings.

#5. Twittad

The Twittad  platform claims to be one of the first sponsored-tweet networks. You are able to set your own cost-per-click, but you have to wait for advertisers to accept your bid. You will also have to identify your niche so that advertisers can match their products with you appropriately. Payment is made via Paypal when you have reached $30 in earnings.

There are many other ways you can make money with your Twitter account, including selling banner ads on your profile page, setting your own rates and selling direct sponsored tweets, charging to send a personal message to your followers, or charging for access to your private list of followers. These advertising services can also help you make money through pay-per-click advertising, which can be especially lucrative if you have a large following.

What About You?

Do you have any experience with any of these ad platforms? Were you successful with any of them?

Tell us about your experiences in the comments! Look forward to hearing your stories
























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How to Stand Out in the Social Media Marketing Frenzy

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Social media has long ceased to be a setting for primarily “social” interactions and discussions.





Now social media platforms and services predominantly function as devices for businesses, entrepreneurs, and freelancers to market their skills on the web to a clientele that numbers in the hundreds of millions. Yes, the web is a marketer’s paradise, where the smallest idea can reach countless people in the amount of time it takes for you to tweet it.


But in case you haven’t noticed, the blogosphere is a big place, filled with entrepreneurs and ambitious self-starters who want to share their unique vision with the world. There might be a dozen small online enterprises specializing in selling supplementary educational apps to college students, all looking to be the biggest player in the market.


In other words, there’s some serious competition in the realm of social media.


You could have a solid and commercially viable idea, but if you don’t have the marketing savvy to harness social media, then you honestly don’t have much of a chance. You’ve got to find a way to stand out among the masses if you want to get anywhere in this business.


If you don’t mind, I’d like to offer the following pearls of wisdom in the hopes of boosting your chances at success through social media marketing.

Don’t shy away from the big and bold

Human beings, especially those of us who spend too much time on the web, tend to have short attention spans. This general impatience among web users has fostered the most distilled and concise marketing tactics ever devised, where whole campaigns rise and fall upon on the successes and failures of social media usage.


A cleverly designed infographic with a hard hitting topic paired with vibrant colors and easy to understand language may launch a graphic designer from obscurity to celebrity overnight. On the other side of things, an ill thought out Twitter campaign (think of the recent McDonald’s fiasco with the #McDStories) could backfire on you as soon as you launch it, completely reversing whatever momentum you had built.


The lesson here is simple: stick to big and bold ideas that can be translated into equally big and bold graphics, images, phrases, and titles. You want to grab your potential reader from the get go with the best that you have to offer, and that might mean taking a risk to stand out among your peers. If there’s some hot topic that other social media users might see as too controversial, be the pioneer and dive into it.

Explore all avenues of social media

Social media doesn’t just mean Twitter and Facebook. I know, I know: they’re by far the biggest players in the industry, they have the most users, and they’re the easiest services to make inroads with. Just because they’re the kings of the industry, that doesn’t mean that they’re the only viable social media services in your marketing campaign.


Tons of niche social media services abound, many of which probably go unnoticed by other web marketers who spend all their time tweeting and friending people. The enthusiasm behind Pinterest is just one example of newer social media services taking a chunk out of the figurative pie. Services like Spotify or Instagram, which have niches in music and pictures respectively, are other targeted social media tools that have massive potential for marketing campaigns.

Have the content to back up your pitch

Most importantly, be sure that you can deliver on whatever it is that you pitch through various social media platforms. I said earlier that you should aim for big and bold messaging in order to grab your reader’s attention—and I stand by that. But if you promise your readers the rainbow, you better have it waiting for them on the other side of that link in your tweet. Otherwise you run the risk of coming off as some spammy service that wants nothing more than a few more followers.


Of course, you don’t have to worry about delivering on your social media pushes if you have the content to back it up. Most people in web marketing take a great idea, test it, develop it, and then think of a way to market it to the masses online effectively. This is how it should be; you let the product speak for itself. You get in trouble when you think of a clever social media marketing scheme without anything beyond the pretty infographic or the witty tagline.


How do you develop and execute a successful social media marketing campaign?
Do you use social media services other than Facebook and Twitter to get your message out there?
Let me know!














































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5 Insights on Facebook vs Pinterest in Driving Sales – Infographic

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Pinterest has been grabbing the headlines recently as its network approaches  20 million users per month.



In March, Compete.com reported that Pinterest had received 18 million unique visitors with AppData reporting that the visual social network had received a record 4.4 million daily active users on March 18.

There are reports that Pinterest’s growth is slowing but just like Twitter and Facebook, reports of its demise maybe slightly premature.

The Power of “Low Friction” Photo Sharing

Pinterest’s value to marketers is that it provides an easy to use platform for “pinning” images, photos and videos to your Pinterest account while also posting and sharing to your networks to Facebook and Twitter in the same process.

Pinterest reduces the effort and friction to share images on the social web which crowd sources your marketing and the spreading of your brand images.

This “low friction sharing” includes links back to the original sharing location. Online stores such as fashion, boutiques, homewares and gift stores can take advantage of this to drive commerce as their products are highly visual and more likely to be shared.

To understand the power of visual sharing, on Facebook research shows that photos are shared 50% more than any other types of updates. This is why Pinterest is so powerful.

The question though is, does it drive sales?

Does Social Commerce Work?

There are social networks and there is commerce and the popular thinking used to be that  they don’t mix. In fact there have been stories circulating on blogs that Facebook is great for engagement but not good for sales.

In digging deeper that appears to be a misconception and social commerce is alive and kicking.

Boticca.com is an online boutique for unique jewelry and fashion accessories by top emerging designers from around the world and has been using Pinterest for quite a while, where it has pinned visually enticing images of its products arranged in categories (boards) with links to the product purchase page.

Boticca Pinterest Page

Their activity on Pinterest is sizable with 67 categories (boards) that average over 700 followers for each board with 2,869 pins (products). As the quality of the photos they have used for their online store is high definition then these HD images ensure that they are also compelling on Pinterest.

Pinterest is really a product catalogue linked to their online store behind every image.



Once you click on that link it takes you to the product on Bottica’s online store where you can continue to review the product further and then make a purchase.

Bottica Facebook “Page”

Bottica’s Facebook page reveals over 26,000 “likes” that also features a prominent Pinterest “Tab” which is powered by the Facebook Pinterest App.

This Pinterest Tab which is effectively the Pinterest site embedded in Facebook allows you to access the online store directly from Facebook. Omni-commerce is evident here. You can buy from Facebook, Pinterest and the ecommerce store.



It recently researched from its own store data which social network drove more social commerce. The results are fascinating and this is from a real store with real numbers.

The 5 Insights on Facebook vs Pinterest

Boticca traced the sales , average sales, conversions and engagement of 50,000 visitors from Pinterest and 50,000 from Facebook.

Here are  5 things Boticca learned about marketing on Facebook compared to Pinterest

• Pinterest users spend more when shopping at $180 vs $85 by Facebook users
• Pinterest users spent 65% less time on the site than Facebook
• Pinterest influenced more sales (10%) than Facebook (7%)
• Pinterest has a 51% lower conversion rate compared to Facebook
• Pinterest acquired 86% new users vs Facebook at 57%

The Infographic

Source: Bottica.com blog

Are you using Pinterest for your online store? Do you have images that you could be pinning to your Pinterest acount?




























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How to Turn Your Instagram Profile into a QR Code

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We live in world and a social web that is a whirlpool of innovation and creativity.


Every day via the blogs I read, the tweets that I glimpse and the emails that arrive in my inbox, I see an array of ideas that makes my head spin with amazement.





Who would have thought that an online pinboard would attract nearly 20 million people a month sharing photos. It sounds like an idea that could have originated after a few drinks down at the local bar!


That is a social media platform called “Pinterest“.


Who would imagine that a social mobile app that can be shared from your phone to Facebook and Twitter, would attract 40 million users a month in less than 2 years, have a library of over 1 billion photos and then be bought by Facebook for $1 billion.


That app’s name is “Instagram“.


Who could have dreamed that a social media platform that allows you to upload your PowerPoint business presentations ( 9 million to date) and publishes them on the web for all to see would attract 29 million unique visitors a month and be snapped up by LinkedIn for $118 million.


This is a social media site called “Slideshare”


Sometimes the simplest focused ideas are the best and those ideas are increasingly in the mobile and social innovation ecosystems.

The Social and Mobile Media Addiction

We live in a world where we are can’t get enough of our mobiles and social networks where we publish media in all its formats that continues to define us and displays our lives to the planet of 7 billion people.


A startup called scan.me founded by Garret Gee, Kirk Ouimet and Ben Turley in 2011, was based on the concept of simplifying the creation of QR codes using a mobile iPhone and iPad app.


The idea was to use simple online and mobile tools to give users a better option for scanning QR codes, and to offer a polished option for businesses that wanted to create those codes.


In its first 12 months Scan.me had 10 million downloads!


Scan.me has just decided, for a bit of technological fun to create a  ”ScantoGram” website that turns your “Instagram Profile” into a QR code.


Here is the Jeff Bullas ScantoGram which I created.

Stage 1: Scan to Gram

Scan to Gram has just been created and they recently did this at a company hackathon where they built out the super-super simple web app.


It allows a user to create a page with Instagram-ified QR Codes, which allow an auto-follow on Instagram.


As an example:

• Say there are 15 Instagrammers whose content blows you away.
• With Scan to Gram, you can create a page to share those 15 people’s content.
• You’ll then have a site, (eg. scantogram.com/jeffbullas) that you can share with others, and that will be filled with Instagram-ified QR codes.
• As you mouse over a profile the image flips and the QR code is revealed which you scan with your mobile scan.me scanning app.
• Anybody who scans those QR codes using a QR code reading app will auto-follow the person on Instagram.

This website is a bit of fun but it provides an insight into what potentially can be done.


They have much bigger plans to take the technology to a new level of social engagement.

Future Stage 2: QR Codes Meets Social Commerce

This is where scan.me says it will get super-exciting. They are planning to marry QR Codes with social commerce.


They haven’t revealed anything more than that at this stage and their simple Scan to Gram example and it may get your ideas and creative juices flowing.


The Scan.me venture is being taken very seriously and is getting some attention from the big boys in Silicon Valley.


In February Google Ventures and Shervin Pishevar’s Menlo Talent Fund invested $1.7 million in Scan.me.


So take a mobile app, make it social add some media and keep it easy and you never know what may happen


I will bring you more of this as it happens


























































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Facebook Approaches 500 Million Mobile Users – Infographic

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I do enjoy my cycling and it is a great way to keep fit, socialize and  enjoy coffee all in one capsule of time.





It also is one way of refreshing the body, mind and soul from the the pressures of work and life.


Cycling though can be dangerous, with trucks and cars and other immovable objects threatening life and limb.


But there is a new and alarming epidemic and trend that is making the roads more dangerous and it is the addicted Facebook user checking their timeline on their mobile.


Luckily the police have realized this and in fact in Fort Lee, New Jersey in the USA they have started booking “dangerous” walkers who are not obeying the rules of the road“.


It certainly is about time because it would be embarrassing to report to my friends that I was injured cycling not from a hitting a bus but by being taken out by an over zealous and jaywalking Facebook user on their mobile!

Facebook Understands the Importance of Mobile

Facebook must have been talking to the police about this mobile addiction trend because they have just bought  Instagram which isn’t even a social media website but just a mobile app (a mobile app that just happens to have nearly 40 million users).


Additionally Facebook has increased its focus on mobile in preparing for a mobile and social web that goes  beyond the Instagram acquisition with the purchase of the Android  photosharing app developer “Lightbox” as reported by Techcrunch.


Lightbox creates photo blogs from a users uploads and has been described as the “Lazy man’s Tumblr”





Now before you rush off and try and sign up to Lightbox, the acquisition is not the business or the app but only the team, as it will be closed down by June 15 and you will see its technology emerge as a Facebook mobile feature sometime in the future.


The other common element to take note of with both these acquisitions are that they are photo centric “apps”, because Facebook knows that photos are the highest engaging content on its platform (50% higher share rate than any other type of update on Facebook timelines).


The challenge that still remains for Facebook,  is how they will monetize the burgeoning mobile space.

The Compelling Facts and Figures

One other compelling reason Facebook is aggressively chasing mobile users is that in the developed countries its growth is approaching saturation point.


In developing countries the use of mobile is predominant with telecommunications infrastructure being built around mobile technology instead of fixed.


This is evident with countries like New Guinea (78%) and  Nigeria (81%) having some of the highest Facebook mobile penetration in the world.

• 54% Penetration of Facebook mobile (488 million out of 901 million users)
• Android and Apple share the largest mobile platform usage at 19% each
• iPad is 5% of Facebook mobile usage
• The top 5 countries using Facebook mobile are USA, Indonesia and India followed by the UK and then Mexico

What About You?

How are you going to take advantage of mobile for your business. Do you have a mobile app for your online store. Is your website optimized for mobile?


Can people read about your brand and business on a mobile?


Look forward to hearing your stories.


































































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Does the Facebook Timeline Increase or Decrease Engagement?

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The rules of marketing are changing. Before the rise of the social web, marketing was about synchronous messaging.


It was about shouting your brand from the roof tops in a one way conversation.


The louder you shouted (the more dollars you spent on mass media) the more money you made.


In essence it was simple.


Today it is a two way conversation with a variety of multimedia on a multitude of global social networks, that starts with engaging the customer with content that involves interaction of some type and then selling the product or service.


In the past engagement was very hard to measure because media was a one way conversation whether that was television, radio  or print.


Today you can instantly see in real time if the content you publish or marketing message you promote is working as you view people liking, sharing or commenting online on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.

Engagement Starts with One Click

Facebook has made the first engagement easy to spot as the ubiquitous “like” being the first indication of your brands touch point and resonance with a fan.


After that the relationship becomes deeper as content is shared with friends and comments are left on the Timeline. The more time and effort displayed by the prospect indicates the building and budding relationship.


Facebook has recently  changed the way  brands interacted with their fans online by totally revamping the new user interface for Facebook and renamed it “Timeline”.


It provides a larger canvas for photos and images and a larger cover photo to showcase a businesses brand along with many other features and functions.

Is the  Facebook Timeline Increasing Engagement?

When the timeline was announced, the screaming of users and brands was deafening as they had to rebuild their Facebook marketing strategies and learn to navigate the new user interface.


Generally no one likes change!


A new study by Sotrender (an online tool for analysis, reporting and optimisation of Facebook), provides some interesting clues as to whether the new Facebook Timeline is working well for business and brands.

What Metrics Haven’t Changed

The study revealed after analyzing 130 biggest UK company profiles and almost 5 thousand posts that the following metrics didn’t change.


None of the following metrics changed significantly in the after-Timeline period:

• page posts per day
• content type distribution
• percent of engaged users per fanpage
• average number of likes, comments and posts per active user
• average response (likes and comments) per post
• cross-page engagement (percent of page’s engaged fans also engaged on other pages)

They discovered that two things had changed significantly.

What Has Changed

The study by Sotrender discovered these two statistically significant changes.

#1. Posts live Longer

Before the timeline’s introduction, users made half of their comments in less than one hour. Now the posts half life has extended to 2 hours and 30 minutes.


Also 80% of all comments are made in 8 hours and 30 minutes (2 hours more than before Timeline.)

Takeaway

If company writes too often, the new posts may cannibalize users engagement of the previous ones.

#2. Bigger Engagement

The other change that was noticeable was that the Facebook timeline has increased growth in post engagement by 13%.


Prior to Timeline the average post stimulated the activity of 158 fans. This has now increased to 179.

Takeaway

Don’t stop providing regular multimedia updates to your business Facebook page timeline. It has increased indeed increased engagement.

What About You?

Have you found the new Timeline increasing or decreasing engagement on your Facebook page?


Have you changed how often you update your business Facebook page?


How have you adapted to the changes?


























































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Why Should I Love Pinterest?

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Making The Use Of Pinterest

If you resided in a very hill collapse amazing for more distance apart state for several months, it may be nicely hep regarding the fashionable social networking has used you absolutely. The brand Pinterest Its a fresh eddition available which allows consumers to create online picture collages, collages efficiently discuss - termed "pinboards"- the second Pinterest simply by consumers.

It truly is exciting and also simple to trap the like wild fire today. If this feature can be downbound careful addicting. I obtained at this time there, and that i can't halt. The children tried on the extender before me personally, and you also always identify i always went along to examine their site.  Naturally we all took the following fundamental many weeks had been full involved yourself pin. There are a variety of fun available.

Perhaps the Pinterest problem is always that it can be gorgeous

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Everything appears to be significant Pinterest that is certainly for safe. So, ideas go into the great entire world Pinterest , and finished complications, because days of my well being rightful seemed to ease from the stream of the impeccable young mocking gown, puppy, it seems,nepachkayutsya or perhaps ft of these mom and dad.

Since the picture is situated, the key Pinterest can be quite official. My partner and i look-alike to think about Pinterest will be about Fb devoid of mourn, along with at this time is just not the african american expression, is the fact when you turn up.

Indeed Pinterest is picturesque. Company, your consumers would like. And not full hearts as well as plants fooled. For anyone pulchritudinous art, Pinterest problematic to easily beat a marketing tool for makes in addition to firms.

What on earth is Pinterest in addition to how come My partner and i attention?

When you have Pinterest account, it is possible to produce collages on the net, "your Percentage") upon several issues in which get your interest and also include pictures in addition to videos on the net "or" is make use of stuff, nevertheless faster, water-resistant, and much frigid.

Pinterest There are approximately 5 million customers and rising. Practically first 05 thousand distinctive consumers going to Pinterest nights, with average, commit a quarter-hour a day on the spot. It is deemed an fantastic fact, I do think that after My partner and i include that increases a number of key. I'm safe any time Pinterest can not be quit and also before you realize it, you are able to demonstrate folks utilizing Pinterest.

It is deemed an dignifying dream board Websites and information sites do not result in the route to move to take into consideration. You better think again.

In Jan 2012, Pinterest had increased traffic to your website LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.When i detected a large big difference within targeted traffic Pinterest in order to our major web site.  It is amazing, Which i wish much more..............

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