Affiliate Marketing on Twitter in 2022

While we’re munching on popcorn (or sipping sedatives) and watching Elon Musk play with his new toy, work’s not going anywhere. We can’t predict if Twitter is going to collapse or not… but we don’t want you to miss a chance to make money on it anyway. So today let’s talk about approaches to monetizing offers through Twitter.

Sponsored tweets

In general, Twitter is a platform for microblogging where people share and read news (and, of course, comment on it). Thus, the most organic way to make money on Twitter is:

1. Develop your blog
2. Start placing ads on it

Everything you need at the first stage is the desire to develop and make money… and free time. To attract your first advertisers, you need nearly 2000 – 3000 followers because no one wants to place their ads where nobody will see them. That’s why you need free time — you should post interesting content regularly to get followers (other ways of getting followers you will find by continuing reading this article).

When your blog is ready for placing ads (has active followers, header, rich history of posts, etc.), how does one find partners ready to pay for using your traffic?

For example, you can sign up on SponsoredTweets, a platform where businesses and influencers can easily find each other for collaboration. The service is managed by IZEA, a worldwide platform for influencer marketing (actually you can use the IZEA site instead of SnonsoredTweets, as it seems to be more updated). 

The bad news is the number of companies (e.g., Volkswagen Group, General Motors) that have paused advertising on Twitter has been growing since the beginning of November because of the uncertainty about the direction of the platform under Musk. Big brands are afraid that their ads will run alongside toxic content.

The good news is there are still companies which stay active, and let’s be honest — the chance to collaborate with a big brand, having 2000 followers, was quite small.

Affiliate programs 

Finally, something that sounds like what you usually deal with — affiliate programs. When you participate in an affiliate program, an advertiser pays you not for placing information about them but for your readers performing target actions:

• following the link
• registration on the site
• subscription
• making a purchase, etc.

So where to find affiliate programs? You can check, for example, such popular platforms as Adf.ly and Fiverr. 

While choosing a program, pay attention to the niche. It will be appropriate to choose something that doesn’t contradict the theme of your blog. Try to work with the advertisers whose products could be interesting to your audience. 

Here your main focus should be conversion. Users should follow the links, otherwise you won’t be paid. To increase your conversion, learn to lead your readers to an affiliate offer organically (this is, of course, a special skill that should be trained).

Profile’s heading monetization 

If you have a few thousand followers, you can place ads not only in your tweets but also in the heading picture of your profile. Money advertisers are ready to pay good money for ads in the headings of popular microblogs. 

The good news is it’s a passive income — you don’t have to post ads every day.

The bad news is it’s hard to make an advertisement look organic when it’s so notable and you need a really loyal audience, so they won’t be annoyed or disengaged by such commercials. 

Launching a campaign

Again, something familiar. You can use Twitter for launching your own campaigns, thus, boosting your affiliate marketing methods. Before you start, you should know about the companies where you can buy ads on Twitter. They are Google Doubleclick Bid Manager, The Trade Desk, GroupM UK Limited, Criteo and Hitpool (there are probably even more companies). But this is just for your general education, as you can buy ads straight through Twitter, using ads.twitter.com. 

However, choosing that option, you will face some obstacles:

• new accounts can’t create ads (but you can buy an account on eBay, for example)
• your account mustn’t be private
• your account should be active;
• the account’s URL must coincide with the end URL in the ad

In general, Twitter ads accounts are quite similar to Facebook ads accounts, so you won’t have problems with it.

Making your account attractive for advertisers

We’ve promised you some hacks to get followers. This is the part of the article where we will discuss it — Yaaay! But first, let’s discuss what you shouldn’t do if you want more followers and more offers. 

1. If you want your followers to feel comfortable with you, don’t turn your blog into an ad dump. Nobody will read your blog if it is hard to understand what its theme is, as there are more ads than content. Keep the balance, act rationally, and don’t say we didn’t warn you. 
2. “Follow for follow” is still a working system in 2022, but don’t try to follow 1 000 accounts in one day. It’s suspicious. Imagine: 7 followers and 943 following… and 3 posted tweets. Would you follow that account? Probably not. The ideal proportion of followers to following for a young account is 2:3.

Ok, if these points are clear — let’s turn to your favorite part.

Resources making the process of getting followers faster

1. Twidium Twitter Edition, a tool with an automated system that finds and follows microblogs that are close to you in terms of topics. If your account is well-designed and contains original interesting tweets, most of the users will respond to you with mutual following.
2. Owlead, a Twitter growth tool that categorizes, filters and finds the most attractive accounts to build your audience.
3. The same concept has Tweepi.

Conclusion

To sum up, Twitter is a social network giving you a range of ways to make money. Although the situation is uncertain now, everything can change for the better later. Stay tuned and don’t miss your chance to benefit.