Josh here: I’m done with high school forever, and I have 5 months off till uni. I’m now going to try to blog at least once a week. Cheers and enjoy the post .

There are two parts to maximizing traffic from twitter – first, you’ll need a boatload of followers (preferably a boatload of pirates from Somalia )  and to format you tweet correctly to allow the most number of clicks from your followers.

So firstly, you’ll need a crane load of followers. But how do you do that?

Your Twitter Profile
 1. Have a twitter Profile Picture – Hopefully a picture of your face, or a personal branding/logo. Research shows that a person with a picture has 10 times more followers than one without. But never, never have a picture of a half-naked girl. Not only are you offended the ladies, but you already lost half off your potential readers as only men are more likely to click on your tweets. (Lame, but too true). Having a picture of a half-naked picture only makes you look more like a spammer too.

2. Fill In Your Bio – with something relevant and interesting. Not just “Student”, or “Porn Director” – be descriptive, and mostly, be brief. You only have 160 characters so you’ll have to be creative. Remember, D0n’7 wr173 1n søm3 fαñcy ʎɐʍ that you find artsy – remember, you are targeting other people to follow you, and they may not be able to read your bio.

3. Don’t spam, especially spamming #trendingtopics hashtags with unrelated items – it can also get you banned – careful there.

4. Follow others! That’s right. This has to be the most effective way to meet new people (and sneakily get new followers as they follow you back). But to be honest, I’ve met some really interesting and great people by following and chatting with them. If I didn’t follow them in the first place, I’ve have never knew what I missed out.

5. You should tweet things that are generally around one central topic. For example, an account called @livetechnews should be tweeting about, well tech news and gadgets and not oral health. Also, never ever tweet about everything you are doing right now. No one cares if you just ate a ham sandwich for lunch. Tweet about things that are interesting. I totally fail at this rule, I tweet about anything & everything

6. @reply people when they talk to you. Don’t just ignore people (unless they are spammers of course, which you should promptly block and report them for spam). This may not seem like an obvious way to get more clicks, but interacting with people allows you to keep your Twitter account active. Yes, having loads of followers is good, but having a load of spam/bot followers isn’t, and won’t get you much traffic to your site.

The Tweet itself
Obviously, you are trying get the maximum traffic from twitter to your site/blog, so you’ll need to format your tweet correctly to get the maximum traffic too! Here’s how you do that:

7. Keep the tweet simple. For a blog post, the simpliest format (and the format you should use) is “[BlogPostTitle] [ShortenedLink]” – Remember the K-I-S-S philosophy – Keep It Simple Stupid. The more complex your tweet is, the harder it is for your followers to understand what you’re trying to convey.

Keep It Simple Stupid!

8. Never have an @username, hyperlink, and a hashtag in a single tweet. For example, my tweet is “@Apple launched a new Macbook http://bit.ly/link #mac #apple #macbook”. Having any of these three things make Twitter create a “link”, with shows as a different color. Your follower could get distracted on the hashtag. Then they check out @Apple. And then they totally forget about the link.  Look how this looks as a tweet:

Too complicated & distracting!

Much Better!

9. Place the most important keywords at the beginning and the end of the tweet. Remember the Google Heat Map? Your most important information should be on your top left, or in the case of a tweet, the first few (and last) characters of a tweet. Confused? Here’s what I mean:

Yes, you may need to restructure your sentence to get to most clicks to your link.

10. Never ever post a full link to your blog post. eg. http://joshlam.com/2009/09/comparsion-the-13-twitter-advertising-networks/, but instead have a shortened link like http://bit.ly/3g2yd1 it’ll make your tweets look neater, and your followers will focus more on your actual blog title, rather than the long link. Also, remember, you’re limited to 140 characters - shortening links saves space too.

11. Use established URL shorteners. Try not to use some unknown URL shortener. Here’s a list of the most trustworthy (and most popular) URL shorteners: -I would generally stick to the top two shorteners.
bit.ly
j.mp
is.gd
sn.im
cli.gs
goo.gl (Google’s own one, you’ll need to install their toolbar)

Bonus
Here’s two awesome tricks with j.mp and bit.ly – they are the same company, thus, their links are interchangeable. For example, this bit.ly link: http://bit.ly/3g2yd1 redirects to the same site as http://j.mp/3g2yd1

MyLikes is a brand new Twitter Advertising Network. Again, with all advertising networks, some tend to be scams.

Here’s a quick overview of MyLikes:

MyLikes makes it extremely easy for you to earn money from Twitter ads, regardless of how big or small your number of followers figure is. I understand that the other networks that I have introduced in the past may be more suited to people with large number of followers (e.g. Sponsored Tweets, ad.ly) where they pay you per tweet. With MyLikes (like RevTwt), they pay you per click. And it’s not just $0.001 per click or something ridiculously low. They pay a whopping $0.5 a click. Two clicks could buy you a McDonald’s burger already.

Here’s something about MyLikes that’s also unheard of in the Twitter Advertising Industry: A $2 minimum payout. Some networks have higher payout rates, which means smaller publishers may have to wait a long time before being able to cash out. That’s not the case with MyLikes.

How do I know it’s not another scam? Well here’s why:
1. I have personally received payment from MyLikes.  Here’s a screenshot of my PayPal payments from MyLikes:

So far I have made $165.97 just from MyLikes ads, from my followers clicking on the links.

This Is NOT a scam.

2. The company MyLikes is actually founded by two ex-Googlers,  the former tech lead for AdSense, Arvind Sundararajan and his wife Bindu Reddy, the former head of product management for Google Apps. That’s right. I told you their names. You could knock on their door demanding your money

3. Discloses are compulsory. MyLikes won’t be a company that the FTC will be chasing anything soon for its non-compliance of its rules.

4. Their system only allows you to tweet up to one ad per day. This will cut the chances of you spamming your followers, as well as allowing your account to be potentially suspended by Twitter.

If you sign up for a MyLikes account, you’ll get a chance to win an iPad every month. Sign Up below:

Sign Up for MyLikes

How’s your earnings amount? Tell me in the comments below.

Make Money by Tweeting Adverts

1. MyLikes – So Far I’ve made $65.90
MyLikes is a new advertising network created by two ex-Google employees as an advertising alternative to Google’s AdSense. MyLikes allows you to create “Likes” of certain products. Advertisers can then allow publishers to post “Sponsored Likes” on to their twitter account as a tweet (as well as Blogger blogs posts). MyLikes is currently the best advertising network for those with a low number of followers, as the payout amount is an industry-low of just $2. Instead of trying to reach $50 or even $100 just to cash out to PayPal, any small publishers can rely on MyLikes. The payments are also automatic, meaning that you won’t have to manually request a payout. The average cost per click is $0.48 – this means you only need 5 clicks per ad to cash out to PayPal! That’s amazingly easy.
Recommended for Twitter accounts with low number of followers.

2. Sponsored Tweets – So far I’ve made $552.13
Sponsored Tweets is IZEA’s brand new advertising network. IZEA is a social media marketing company and the world leader in sponsored conversations. IZEA operates a network of over 250000 bloggers and 25000 advertisers. Izea has numerous sponsored advertising networks prior to SponsoredTweets, including PayPerPost and SocialSpark. This being said, SponsoredTweets is geared more towards Web Celebrities like John Chow and Shoemoney, although smaller tweeters will still get opportunities.
Recommended for those with high number of followers (ie. 10,000+).

3. ad.ly – S0 far I’ve made $750.62
ad.ly, not to be confused with adf.ly below, is the latest Twitter Advertising network, having just launched on the 22nd of September. Again, similar to Sponsored Tweets above, this service mostly caters to highend advertisers (my two advertisers were Microsoft and NBC) wanting to connect with celebrities and other high-end Twitter users. In fact, founder and CEO Sean Rad says that he wants Ad.ly to be the Federated Media for Twitter. They have an impressive list of high-profile celebrities, including Kim Kardashian, Brooke Burke, Nicole Richie, Brody Jenner, Dr. Drew and Samantha Ronson. ad.ly also allows you to donate a portion of your earnings to a charity of your choice (similar to AdCause).
Recommended for those with high number of followers (ie. 10,000+).

4. TwittAd – So far I’ve made $407.96
TwittAd is the original (and the first) Twitter advertising network. Currently, the payment system is “Pay Per Opportunity”,where you sell your background and allow 3 advertising tweet on your twitter account for a sett time (usually 7 days). Although there aren’t many opportunities, once in a while an opportunity once pop up, and it can be quite high paying too (one was $100! for just 7 days).
Recommended for those with a medium number of followers (ie. in the thousands).

5. RevTwt - So far I’ve made $121.51
Although RevTwt‘s website does look like a scam, I’ll admit it’s not a scam. RevTwt advertising are placed as a tweet, which is displayed on your Twitter Profile. There are no disclaimers for the ads, so your followers may find it hard to distinguish between ads and real tweets. Unlike Magpie though, RevTwt pays per click, not per view (a.k.a. Pay-Per-Tweet). This allows the system to be more open to click fraud, similar to Google AdSense, although their system in place seems to be able to detect fraud pretty well, by looking at RevTwt’s Twitter profile. If you have over 8,000 followers, you become part of RevTwt‘s Elite program, with higher paying ads up to $0.20 per click. Normal adverts pays around $0.05 per click.
Update: MyLikes’ average is $0.48 per click. You can earn 5 times more with MyLikes compared with RevTwt.

6. Be-A-Magpie – So far I’ve made $429.70
Be-A-Magpie, a company located in Germany, places relevant advert “tweets” which are placed along with your existing tweets. They pay according to 4 different models: pay per view, pay per click, pay per lead and pay per sale. Just like any other Entrepreneurial Teenager would do, I signed up for this service (with a sub account) to experiment with it. At first, the adverts were about Magpie itself, or Magpie’s parent company’s other product called Stock Pilot. And then I discovered they paid an extremely high €20-30 per pay-per-view tweet. You can cash out after you reach €50. Now, simple maths can tell you that with only 2 magpie tweets, you can get up to €50 in your PayPal already! So you might be asking, I made $429.70 (or €323.90) from something as simple as this? Well, it’s the truth. Read the blog post about Magpie, with the PayPal payment proof.
Update: Seems pretty inactive now. I’m not receiving any more ads from Magpie.

7. PayMeTweets
PayMeTweets pays you to retweet sponsors. In my opinion, they pay so ridiculously  low (less than $0.100 CPM per retweet, or less than $0.10 per 1000 followers) it’s not even worth it. With my @joshlam account (with 45,000+ followers), the ads pay $0.20-$0.80, which is really low when compared to Sponsored Tweets ($110 per tweet) or Magpie (€32/$46 per tweet).

8. TweetROI
Unlike PayMeTweets,  the payment terms are more reasonable. The highest tweet pays $2.5, and with a $50 payout, this isn’t too bad. Similarly to the other smaller advertising networks, there doesn’t seem like many opportunities available.

9. AdCause
AdCause is a Twitter advertising network with a twist. They allow you to donate a portion (or all of) your earnings to a specific charity of your choice. While this seems like a good idea, there doesn’t seem like a load of advertisers on this network once again.

10. twivert
Twivert is a Pay Per Click advertising network, similar to RevTwt above. On average, the payment terms is $0.01 per click. Sign up though this promotional link to get a $5 bonus. Overall, the payout is one of the lowest compared to the other networks, although the earning potential seems quite low.

Make money by Shortening URL’s

11. adf.ly
Adf.ly or “AdFly” is a Pay-Per-Impression advertising network. Unlike other networks, adf.ly shows an ad while your visitor is being transfer to their link – which might be an annoyance to your followers. Payment is based on CPM, with up to $1.5CPM for US visitors to $0.50CPM for International Visitors. View this sample shortened link http://adf.ly/59/joshlam where an ad (in my case this was simply adf.ly‘s website) is shown before being redirected to joshlam.com. Notice the “Skip Ad” button at the top right.

12. Tweetbucks
Tweetbucks allow you to make money via affiliate links, abet Tweetbucks will take a portion of the affiliate earnings per sale. To be honest, this is really a lazy man’s way to not signing up to ClickBank, Commission Junction or Amazon Associates and just create the links yourself. By signing up to these networks yourself, no third-party will take a portion of your earnings, which will mean more money for you.

13. adjix.com
Those shortened URL’s contain an iFrame which contains ads. The payouts are quite low compared to the two other service I mentioned above. I only suggest using Adjix if you have a large base of followers, otherwise you’ll find it quite hard to monetize this service. Personally, I don’t actually like this service much.

(14. Revtwt)
Revtwt has been previously mentioned above as a Pay-Per-Click network, but they also allow you to make money by Shortening Links.

Scams

As much as I’ll like to promote some of these companies, I have to shame some companies as well.  These companies are unlikely to pay you any money, even though you’ve tweeted their ads. Do not sign up for these networks. Here’s the list: 

YakBurst
YakBurst is a scam. They will not pay you any requested funds from your account.  It states that payments will be made from the 1st to the 15th every month. I’ve still haven’t received a singly payment from them yet from a request made 2 months ago. www.yakburst.com

Network	Advertisting Model	Disclourse	Referral Program?	Mininium Payout	Payment Options
MyLikes	Pay Per Click	Required, Shown as: #ad	Yes	$2	PayPal
Sponsored Tweets	Pay Per Tweet	Required, Customizeable	No	$50	PayPal
Ad.ly	Pay Per Tweet	Required, Shown as: (Ad)	Yes	$50	PayPal, check
RevTwt	Pay Per Click	None	Yes	$20	PayPal, check at $100
TwittAd	Pay Per "Opportunity" (usually 3 tweets and your background)	Required	Yes	$30	PayPal
Be-a-Magpie	Pay Per Lead and Pay Per Tweet	Required, but Custom	Yes	€ 50	PayPal
AdCause	Pay Per "Opportunity"	None	No	$25	PayPal
Pay Me Tweets	Pay Per Tweet	None	No	$50	PayPal
TweetROI	Pay Per Tweet	None	No	$50	PayPal
twivert	Pay Per Click	None	No	$30	PayPal
adf.ly	Pay Per Impression	None	Yes	$25	PayPal
tweetbucks	Pay Per Lead	None	Yes	$25	PayPal
adjix	Pay Per Impression	None	No	$25	Cheque

Changelog:
18/04 Update 2: Added MyLikes, new jQuery sortable table and updated earnings amount
20/10 Update 1: Added ad.ly and updated new earnings amount

Once again, there’s another Twitter Advertising Network on the interwebs. Many people think their website looks too scammy to be true. Well, we’re going to find out.
Similar to Magpie, RevTwt advertising are placed as a tweet, which is displayed on your Twitter Profile. There are no disclaimers for the ads, so your followers may find it hard to distinguish between ads and real tweets. Unlike Magpie though, RevTwt pays per click, not per view (a.k.a. Pay-Per-Tweet). This allows the system to be more open to click fraud, like Google AdSense, although their system in place seems to be able to detect fraud pretty well, by looking at RevTwt’s Twitter profile.

Anyways, back to the experiment. In RevTwt, I entered my (test) Twitter account information and set it to automatically post an ad a day. This Twitter account has more than 22,000 followers. I was given the title of an “Elite Twitterer”, since I had over 8,000 followers (Which isn’t hard to do). Being an Elite Twitterer, I was given access to special adverts, wish paid more than the normal adverts. The highest is 20 cents a click, although the wherether the click is counted are based on a per country basis, which is different for each advert.

Simple math can show that if you tweet an advert worth 20 cents per click and get 10 clicks, you’ll get 2 dollars a day. That’s not much, but that amounts to $62 per month, or $744 a year! That $62 could cover your monthly phone bill easily, or it could even pay for a pretty nice meal.

Well here’s my verdict: RevTwt is NOT a Scam.
I’ve made a total of $71.69 from RevTwt so far, but I’m sure I could make even more if I tried even harder, e.g. placing more adverts.

Check my PayPal history below: 

I’m not asking you to buy anything. Nor am I asking you to pay me for this information. But I suggest that you check out RevTwt – it’s one of those money makers that need little no work at all, except you should tweet often (hopefully you already do), and requesting payment (don’t forget to check) once you hit the $20 payment threshold. Done.

7th Jan Update: Magpie used to be a great money-maker. But there doesn’t seem to be any advertisers anymore. Visit this blog post comparing 12 Twitter Advertising Networks to join other networks.

Okay, I lied. I didn’t just use Twitter. I signed up for Magpie as well.

So what is Magpie? As many of you know, there’s currently a controversial new Twitter Advertising Company called Magpie, a company located in Germany. Magpie places relevant advert “tweets” which are placed along with your existing tweets. They pay according to 4 different models: pay per view, pay-per-click, pay per lead and pay per sale. Many people don’t like having adverts in

Just like any other Entrepreneurial Teenager would do, I signed up for this service (with a sub account) to experiment with it. At first, the adverts were about Magpie itself, or Magpie’s parent company’s other product called Stock Pilot. And then I discovered they paid an extremely high €20-30 per pay-per-view tweet. You can cash out after you reach €50. Now, simple maths can tell you that with only 2 magpie tweets, you can get up to €50 in your PayPal already! An example of the tweets are shown below.

So you might be asking, I made $429.70 (or €323.90) from something as simple as this? Well, it’s the truth. Check out my PayPal history:

Not Bad. So that’s all there is to the Magpie program. There’s so little work involved, anyone could earn a few euros with no experience.

I know Twitter  is for real people, and asks the question “What are you doing right now?”, not “What are you advertising right now? “.  But these magpie are actually relevant to your normal tweets, making them less like “advertising”, and sometimes they make it hard for someone to realize if it’s an ad or a real tweet.

Therefore, I’m closing the experiment down. But if you’ll like to experiment with Magpie and prehaps earn a few dollars euros, I suggest you to sign up for Magpie. Who knows, you might even get a few hundreds euros just like me!

Tell me how Magpie worked out for you in the comments! I’ll love to know!

Twitter is a social network which simply asks the question, “What are you doing?” And you reply in 140 characters or less by mobile texting, instant message, or the web. It okay if you’re still new to this Twitter “thing”, you’re not alone. 26% of the U.S. population don’t even know what Twitter is yet. Hopefully after this post, we’ll change your mind.

Sick of malicious apps? Sick of typing in your Twitter passwords to third party apps and not even knowing what they are going to do with it? Welcome to OAuth, the token based authentication system, now available as a public beta for Twitter Apps! This was just announced (via Twitter, naturally) by Alex Payne, Twitter API’s lead.

An example of the authentication process is seen above, with TipJoy.

Josh;s Verdict: Simple, no password required. Now we’ll just have for other Apps to use this, to reduce abuse.

New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great stuff!

If you’re new to Twitter, you may want to read this. And even if you’re not new to Twitter, and want to automate your tasks on Twitter, read on.


I’m going to introduce Tweetlater - please don’t assume about their name and think that all they do is allow to schedule your tweets to a later time. They offer way more than that. Here’s what Tweetlater CAN do: 



Send automated thank you notes to new followers, and automatically follow new followers, if you choose to do so. Optionally, select to vet (approve, ignore, block) new followers before we perform your selected automation tasks.

Grab your own personal 140-character tweet scheduling engine and RSS feed. You can schedule and publish tweets that don’t go to Twitter, they go to your personal tweet stream, which is available in RSS, XML and Javascript formats.

Josh’s Verdict: All that, and for free too! You can add and manage as many Twitter accounts as you want. Sign up Today, like I did. Tweetlater helped me automate a number of tasks which would take me way too long if I did it manually – After all, I have 10k+ followers!


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Topify basically does 3 things with your Twitter account within your email, without even going on the Twitter website. If you’re the Power Twitter user, this is your serious power tool and time saver.Topify was created by two former TechCrunch France employees, Ouriel Ohayon (@ourielohayon) and Arik Framovitch (@arikfr).

1. First of all, they create better notification emails when some one follows you. The improved email is seen below:

The email now shows Following/Followers stats, their Display Image, Bio, On Twitter Since, Updates Count, their Website and their Latest Update, versus the original Twitter one, which only told you your new follower’s name and username (e.g. only @Joshlam and Josh Lam).

2. Awesome. I want to follow this guy who just followed me. Do you need to go all the way to twitter.com, sign-in, go to the guy’s profile page, and click follow? Well, with Topify, you don’t have to. All you need to do is to reply to the email. Simple, Easy and Smart. Now why didn’t Twitter think of this before?

3. How about Direct Messages?
I just followed this really cool guy on Twitter (I know, it’s @Joshlam) and he told me I was awesome
Topify makes it really easy to reply to Direct Messages. Once again, all you need to do is to reply to the Direct Message notification email.Done.

So, to conclude, Topify may be simple, but has to be a great shortcut, especially if you’re a Power Twitter user.

Topify is currently in private beta. So how do you get into the action then?
Well, as a lucky Josh’s Blog reader, you get EXCLUSIVE invites to Topify. Just click here. 100 Invites only!

If you’re on Twitter, follow @Joshlam as well for Josh’s Blog updates, exclusive Beta Invites and cool freebies!

New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great beta invites!

Say goodbye to the fun of reading private Twitter messages sent improperly and gathered on DMFail. Sometime today, Twitter says in an email, they’ll change the way private messages are sent so that you can use either [D + username + message] OR [DM + username + message].
It’s a subtle feature change, but one that will avoid embarrassment for people who’ve accidentally made their private messages public.

New to Josh’s Blog? Make sure you follow my RSS feed so you don’t miss anymore great stuff!