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!

Cashgopher lets you earn money for doing nothing on your Computer!

The title sounds too good to be true for you?

I thought the same as i saw the advertisements in my preferred discussion website myLot (by the way, a fun way to earn some extra money too - read my myLot guide if you're interested in discussing almost everything you like!)

So i signed up a few weeks ago and what shall i tell you... it's as simple as it can be.

1. Download their free CashGopher software
2. Cashgopher is working in the background when your computer is idle
3. It tests the website up-time for webmasters who like to know if their websites are accessible from different parts of the world for any given time
4. A part of this income from these customers will be shared daily with the members who used Cashgopher.
5. The income from Cashgopher depends on several factors:
   - Location of your country
   - Internet connection speed
   - Computer power
   - your usage habits of the internet
6. Payout is monthly via Paypal as soon as you reach 10$.
7. The earning estimate that we can achieve is between 10$ and 1.000 $ if we use Cashgopher each day for a full year.
8. Increase your income by inviting your friends to use Cashgopher, too and Earn 25% of their income.

If you like what you read just now, simply sign up and start earning some extra cash for letting your computer do the work

Other easy ways to earn you some extra money without spending much time:

With these programs you can earn money on Twitter, Facebook or on your websites/blogs

• MyLikes (weekly payout from 2$ on, Facebook + Twitter, earn for each click, earn for producing youTube videos),
• Sponsored Tweets (set your own price/tweet or earn for each click),
• Ad.ly (pays per tweet),
• Revtwt (earn for each click on Facebook + Twitter),
• 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)
• myLot (Discuss & Socialize with the myLot community and get on top paid for doing this - How to get the most out of myLot? Read my myLot guide)
• CBLeads.com (earn up to 2.30 $ just for providing e-mail submissions for Tim Bekker's Affiliate programs, a free Clickbank Account is necessary before you sign up to earn additional commissions!)

Twitter: How to be followed, retweeted, mentioned by a celebrity!

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeTwitter is one of the most powerful marketing & promotion tools anyone could think of! But for using it as a powerful tool, you have to accumulate thousands of followers and interact with hundreds of them. Otherwise you will end up with followers who are not responsive at all to your own tweets. But building up such a huge follower base is a time consuming job and could even get your account suspended by Twitter if you follow and unfollow too fast too many other members!

The easiest way to get noticed your tweets would be to get a Retweet or a Follow from a member with many followers (which would be a celebrity, another possibility for free is mentioned at the end of the post).

My experience in getting a retweet from Alyssa Milano

In March 2010 i found an extraordinary website which combined music and beautiful animations while you moved your mouse to the music! And Alyssa Milano found it so cool that she gave me a Retweet for it.

The first preparation should be to take care

• how many @-replies the celebrity gets at the moment.
  REASON: As soon as the celebrity made a tweet, hundred of fans will do a retweet of it. This would mess up with your intention that your tweet will be seen by your celebrity in the mentioning-Timeline.
  The best time to send your celebrity a tweet would be when the retweets are dying down to just one per minute (Can take 1/2 - 1 hour after the previous tweet depending on the tweet).

Now you should just tweet your celebrity something like

• outstanding news,
• beautiful animations/music or
• cute videos
• funny graphics
• helpful advice for other members
• funny comment on one of the celeb's tweets.
• or you take part in

The TwitChange-Celebrity-Charity-Auction

Getting more than a Retweet is possible until Saturday 25th September by a charity event called Twitchange.

Twitchange did setup an Ebay-Account "TwitChange-Auction" and is auctioning the following items of more than 100 celebrities (358 auctions to take part in).

You can bid on

• Twitter MEGA packages which include a single mention, follow for at least 90 days and a retweet.

For the smaller budget you can bid on

• a single mention,
• a retweet or
• following you for at least 90 days.

At the moment the cheapest prices for

• a Twitter MEGA Package is around 35$. (The celebrity @liltwist has 350.000+ followers, this might be a great bargain!)
• a Retweet may be around 40 - 50 $
• a mention could be 52 - 65$
• a follow is at 56$

If you have a fat pocket, you might enjoy to bid on these three TOP auctions for a Twitter MEGA Package:

1. Dana White
2. Zachary Levi
3. Jewel Staite
4. Eva Longoria

You may ask why are there not the celebrities with the most followers on TOP of this list?

The cause for this order in the list is that these celebrities offer a special bonus for the winner of their MEGA Package auction. Most celebrities offer additionally a phone or Skype call, tickets for their shows/events, backstage meetings, signed DVDs/Books/autograms or fashion tips.

For example Dana White offers additionally the complete costs of a journey to his next fight that's why he seems to be ahead with the highest bid of more than 15.000 $.

The Background for this TwitChange-Celebrity-Auction is to raise money for a good cause!

The TwitChange-Auction is for a good cause, that's why so many celebrities take part in it. When you bid and win the auction the spent money will be donated to aHomeInHaiti.org.

This is a charity who takes care that the Miriam Center can be finished to be rebuild. It's a Home for orphans with major life challenges like cerebral palsy or severe autism.

Do you think it's worthwhile to take part in this kind of auction and do you think it will be beneficial to grow your own Twitter account when you buy a mention, retweet or a follow from a celebrity?

Tomorrow you can read on The One Minute Guide - How to get Retweets to thousands of Twitter followers for FREE! (even when you have just 1 Twitter follower)

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?

MyLikes: How to advertise in Twitter!

Earn money on Twitter

Today i would have reached my 2nd payout in MyLikes (1st payment proof Mylikes) with around 3 $. I reached this payout with just one Likes which i tweeted almost everyday. You can say 3$ earned for 5 Minutes work as you can schedule one Likes for 4 days.If they still have enough funds, you can re-post your Likes again for four days and so on (with a slightly different tweet). I guess as long as their budget does not run out of funds, i might go along with them throughout May 2010 :)

What did i do now with my earnings from the 2nd "payout"?

I transferred it into a MyLikes Advertiser account. The minimum balance to advertise in MyLikes is 20$ and you just add up the difference to your earnings via PayPal or directly with your credit card.

The first step in creating a MyLikes campaign is by choosing which kind of campaign you want to start.

Since a few days MyLikes added the possibility to make a Pay-per-video Campaign. The Pay-per-video campaign gives advertisers the opportunity to let a popular Youtube member create a video and this Youtube member will broadcast it to their subscribers for the advertiser I guess it will take some days/weeks until advertiser offer this kind of campaigns.
Pay-per-Tweet Campaigns haven't been used at the moment by advertisers within my selected MyLikes categories as i believe the price is too high for the common Twitter member. The price of the pay-per-Tweet campaign is similar to Sponsored Tweets suggested price but it can't be changed by the MyLikes-member.

Only if you want to advertise with some real influencer e.g. Stars, Problogger a pay-per-Tweet campaign could be an alternative to the Pay-per-Click campaign. The possibility that fans keep an eye on the profiles of these famous members even hours or days later and click on the ad link, could bleed out some Pay-per-Click campaign advertiser ;-)

The setup of a pay-per-click campaign is easy and fast to manage like you can see in this screenshot:

• Simply type in the name of the campaign (Title)
• Link to the advertised website/blog/affiliate program
• Select from which location the clicks can get paid (for now the choice is only between United States or worldwide)

The third step is the final step before you make the payment and then your campaign will be already live available for the other MyLikes' members to be tweeted, posted or embedded.
You have to choose the maximum pay-per-click amount (min. 0.05 $) and your initial budget (min. 20$ can always be increased in the future by adding funds). Additionally you can choose in which categories your campaign will be displayed. These settings can be changed during the duration of an active campaign (you can decrease / raise the PPC amount, add or delete categories).
The last action to do will be uploading a picture (This is the "edit campaign" screen shot, in the "create campaign" procedure wasn't the possibility to upload a picture!)

My first impression of the MyLikes campaign setup:

• Only little descriptions and no introduction about minimum cost per click or minimum budget available, only after you type in a too low amount you get a red warning with the minimum amounts
• No approval of tweets for influencer required if you create a pay-per-click campaign (so far i didn't see a possibility to disapprove a created sponsored Likes)
• No scheduled time of the sponsored Likes visible (guess will be posted after the tweet has been analyzed)
• Approval of tweets possible with Pay-per-Tweet campaign (Step 2 - additional option to choose at which time the influencer shall tweet and if approval is required)
• It seems that for each new created campaign a budget with at least 20 $ is necessary as there is no delete button for your "old" campaigns

In case you would like to earn from these MyLikes campaigns, you can easily sign-up with MyLikes and start liking products or Sponsored Likes and earn for each click/tweet or video a small, big or great amount of money. In my previous article MyLikes: Make money with Twitter i explained how to start, which earnings opportunity are available and which steps you should take to succeed in MyLikes.

Earn money on Twitter

In the next few days i will write a second part about the success of Twitter Advertising in MyLikes.

Did you advertise in the past in Twitter? With which programs did you sign-up? Which campaigns have been successful for you?

Spam from support@twitter.com!! Viagra Spammer on the way

Just received a strange sounding e-mail from support@twitter.com (screen shot) with the title Undelivered Message 22-318.

The screen shot looks like this



The problem is that the real link for this mysterious delayed message doesn't lead you to your Twitter account!



Be aware of E-Mails coming from support@twitter.com - They are not really from Twitter.

In Twitter they talk that if you click through to the Reported Attack Page you might get a visit from malicious software, trojans or a Viagra website will be displayed!

UPDATE: On 29th April 2010 i got a second email from support@twitter.com - with a slightly different message (You have 3 unread messages) which means you should take care - it's not over yet (the redirected URL changed, too!).

MyLikes: Make money with Twitter

MyLikes is another way to get new followers on twitter and earn additional money from sponsored Likes. The company is already several months old but MyLikes offers one of the best earnings opportunities. You will get paid for each click a certain amount which MyLikes calculates after you signed up. This price is fixed until your score moves up/down. Payout is every Friday as soon as you reach 2$.

Influence your CPC-Score


To move your score, the ads have to be relevant for your Twitter audience. If you get a nice amount of clicks which might result in purchases or activities on the advertised websites, your CPC will move up after adjusting your account (done every two or three weeks). Posting irrelevant ads might lead in the future to a lower CPC for your MyLikes account.
The score is NOT depending on the amount of Twitter-Followers you have as i saw several MyLikes members (with less followers) who have a higher CPC than myself with more than 11.900 followers (mine is 0.43 $/click). It seems important, too, that you have more followers than you are following.

Become an MyLikes Influencer and win additional cash prizes for your recommendations!

Inside of MyLikes are different levels to become a better influencer. The more points you get (higher level you reach), the more often your Likes will be shown on the front page and after other members submit their Likes to the same topic.
There are several competitions running every month which highlight usually the best lists (for a specific topic - at the moment e.g. Best restaurants list and 8 other lists). To increase your chances in winning a 10$ cash prize, you should do the following actions

• achieve the level of a Fiery pro (300+ points) in MyLikes, it just gives you better chances in winning one of the additional competition prizes (as they see you are active and helpful)
• follow other members inside of MyLikes
• recommend not only sponsored Likes (your paid ads) but what else you like (Pizza brand, Fast food chain, restaurants, movies, actors, mobile phones, computer, cars, clothes and so on), so that you can create some of the competition lists ;-)
• comment on other followers Likes to encourage them to comment on your likes as well
• write good recommendations for the Likes which you include in your competition lists

More opportunities to earn money with MyLikes

You can

1. send a tweet to your followers on Twitter,
2. make a blog post about the sponsored Likes and/or
3. put a widget with the active sponsored Likes on your blog/website (similar to Google Adsense, only the MyLikes-CPC might be more lucrative)

and get paid by MyLikes every time they count a valid click for one of your sponsored Likes!

My first payment proof of MyLikes

Sponsored Tweets - Is it the end for it?

Since the last year several companies took advantage of Twitter's ad-less service and introduced their service to advertisers and publisher (members of twitter). It seemed to be a prosperous business for everyone who jumped on the bandwagon - publisher, advertisers and the companies who handled the transactions - be it Ad.ly, Sponsored Tweets, MyLikes, Magpie, Revtwt, Twivert, Twittad, Paymetweets and many more.

Some of the mentioned services pay you

• a fixed price for each tweet, no matter how many clicks your tweet received (Sponsored Tweets has ClickWatch enabled which means, if the target of 1,50 $/click is not reached, the tweet will be sent out 24 hours later again),

other services pay you

• for each click the given link received,
• for each follower that views your tweet
• or for each sale a user that your given link generates.

In the last months Twitter officials already announced that they themselves want to introduce advertisement in Twitter. In the last few days more details got into the light that Twitter will offer its own ad platform.

It's not that clear yet how it will work out as they are just in the Beta phase but it seems like the ads will be published in your tweet depending on what you tweet (keywords & #hashtags).
A Twitter official told on a press conference that it will be explicit clear that a sponsor paid for the ad and it will be made relevant and useful, so the user doesn't think of an ad!

With 50 million tweets per day, around 600 tweets per second, it's a big opportunity for Twitter to start earning money instead of losing money. But it seems like Twitter will allow users to opt-out of Ads in their own twitter time line for a small fee.

In the end it all depends if the users of Twitter accept the "paid ads" or if many will leave Twitter as soon as they discover ads in their time line (depending for which company). Not sure if this will also lead to a kind of "click fraud" as the users may not know for which company the shown ad will be, if the user can delete this ad like any other tweet you have sent out to your follower and if the pricing of Twitter's own ad platform might be competitive with the ones who are already in the market.

If you think of Kim Kardashian who seems to charge 10.000 $, Holly Madison which charges 1.250 $ or Shoemoney who gets 176+$ for a Sponsored Tweet, they will opt out of this service but it seems that Twitter has to look themselves in which user account they can place the appropriate ad not only depending on keywords and Hashtags but also followers and the activity of these followers (click-through rate).

What do you think?

• will you stop using Twitter when they built ads into your twitter stream?
• will you pay a small fee to get rid of Twitter's own ads?
• will it affect your use of sponsored Tweets in the future?