TOP FIVE posts of July 2011

Image via WikipediaThe most read posts in July 2011 have been:

1. Twitter: How to be followed, retweeted and mentioned by a celebrity!
2. Get a FREE Make Money Online Training Package!
3. Adgitize: The secret of getting an ad paid by Adgitize and make a profit with it!
4. Supporting a good cause while searching the web!
5. Sponsored Tweets: How NOT to make money off Twitter advertising!

Have a great time (re-) reading these posts!

Sponsored Tweets: How NOT to make money

Sometimes you keep on wondering how "intelligent" some members of these Sponsored Tweets companies must be, just to get a few cents for a click on their ads - not thinking about the consequences. In the end they might loose out not only the clicks they received on this particular sponsored offer but most likely be banned if they are repeated offenders of these programs.

Just watch out for this tweet (to clarify: It's about my campaign which i advertised in Sponsored Tweets two days ago!)

With these programs you can earn money on Twitter & your websites/blogs

• MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, earn for each click),
• Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
• Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
• Revtwt (earn for each click),
• Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
• Twivert (get money for each click)
• Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)

Another case are - if you select to approve ads before they are tweeted out - that you can already reject tweets which clearly ask for Tweets or which don't have anything to do with the product you want to advertise like these Tweets:

asking for clicks

Wrong or too short product description

No description at all, just the disclosure.

I saw these tweets in some profiles who only tweeted out tweets like this. It seems like the other advertisers just selected auto-approval which might result in a ZERO result for them.

Some even ask in their Sponsored Tweets for Retweets to gain more exposure and clicks for their Sponsored Tweet.

Make money with Twitter: Be a magpie or not?

Image via CrunchBase

Be a Magpie is another company who claims that you can make a lot of money by posting advertisements to Twitter. Before you register with them they give you an estimate of how much you could earn per month from their tweets.

In my case their estimate was more than 1.000 EURO / month as i had six months ago around 10.000 followers. But they don't tell you how they calculate this income because in my case it was 0.00 EURO even after 6 months and several tweets from them.

Why you don't earn much with Be a magpie?

Most of my offered tweets have been affiliate links to website on which the interested clicker has to buy the offered item. Only in this case you would earn real good money (up to 10% of the sales price). In my case it was mostly for Web Hosting, holiday flights and software. But you could choose as well that you don't want to tweet such offers. In this case you have to wait a very long time until you would get a Pay-per-Tweet offer (or perhaps this was only in my case as the price might be more expensive for an advertiser to show up in my timeline).

Another reason why you have to take care when you are member of Be-a-Magpie!

Your account can get easily terminated (which happened to mine yesterday) because of violating their terms. You will get the following Account Suspension notice 4 weeks before they may terminate your account if you don't follow their rules:

At Magpie we are committed to providing a quality service for Twitterers, Followers and Clients. To ensure we deliver on this commitment, Magpie periodically monitors our accounts for compliance with the Magpie & Friends Ltd. Terms and Conditions which can be looked up at http://be-a-magpie.com/twitterers/terms-and-conditions.

Our system has flagged your account @cornyman as in violation of clause 4 - Misuse and Fraud – the posting of tweets in an automated manner e.g. by aggregating one or more RSS feeds. As per these terms and conditions, this sort of Twitter account does not qualify for participation in the Magpie Network and as a result, your account has been suspended.

To automatically have your account reactivated, please reduce the number of automated tweets to less than 15% of your total tweets. Your Twitter account will be monitored over the next four weeks to gauge compliance with our terms and conditions. If compliance is achieved during this period, your account will automatically be reinstated. Continual non-compliance will result in account termination and forfeiting of your earnings.

I just had no time to post that much to my Twitter account on my own as i moved back to Germany and had much more important things to do than to think about a certain percentage.

I guess if you are on several months holidays but have scheduled blog posts, you could get in trouble, too. The same will be when you might be sick but inject some RSS-Feeds from other blogs without posting yourself...

Not a very nice move from Be-a-magpie but as i didn't loose any money (just wasted my time with it), i can say

Hopefully everyone else has more luck with Be-a-magpie!

I'm much more happy with

• MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, earn for each click),
• Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
• Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
• Revtwt (earn for each click),
• Twittad (get an ad on your twitter profile background and get paid to show it for up to one month)
• Twivert (get money for each click)
• Paid-to-promote (get money for each valid visitor to your blog)

Is Twitter killing Get Paid to Tweet companies? Ban on third party ads!

Image via Wikipedia

Twitter announced yesterday that they will ban tweets of third party applications which inject ads in a user's timeline in the near future through their API.

This 3rd party ad ban affects everyone who works together with Sponsored Tweets, Ad.ly, Revtwt, MyLikes, Twivert, Twittad, Magpie and many other advertising companies who connected advertisers and Twitter users to promote their product in Twitter.

Twitter announced this step for several reasons:

1. Third party application companies don't have to deal directly with problems that are caused by their tweets. Twitter will get the support tickets of the other users who complain about it, may it be spammy accounts (only ads) or virus infected links and so on.
   
   
2. Twitter's own Promoted Tweets won't be so effective when other third party applications want to monetize user profiles and make themselves a lot of cash with the fees they collect from the advertisers without sharing the earned $ with Twitter (Twitter itself doesn't share their income with users, too!)
   
   
3. Twitter's unique user experience may get lost because of hundred similar tweets from these ad networks which annoys in the long run a lot of users and could minimize the number of active users over the time.

My Opinion:

It will be interesting to see how the above mentioned ad companies react as they have only 30 days to change the way their third party programs work.

I could imagine that several ad companies might let the users tweet the ads manually or a two click-action similar to the Retweet-Button which takes you to your Twitter account and you press then the "Tweet"-Button to tweet it into your timeline. Sponsored Tweets already announced this kind of change in their latest blog post.

The problem with this method is that the companies can't detect easily how often a tweet will be tweeted within a day (many of the companies permit only between one - six tweets/day) and advertisers might not get a their required diversified audience for their spent budget of the paid tweets.

Another problem will arouse when advertisers give you a certain time frame in which the paid tweet should be published. As most advertisers are from the United States this could get difficult if Asians or European have to tweet it manually at sleeping times ;)

Another interesting aspect might be what will happen to the earned money which the members of these 3rd party ad companies hold in their account?

Will they get paid even when the minimum amount is not yet reached because their business is no more available?