I realised the importance of having an online presence sometime in the last year when I saw how much money people were making by using Twitter as a marketing channel. Since I was new to marketing & selling products on the internet, it was shocking to me how one can leverage social media to build businesses online.
I didn't know how to make money through an online presence, but the main thing I realised was that having an online presence is important and it can definitely benefit me one way or the other in the future.
So I started building my online presence on Twitter since I was mainly using Twitter at the time.
It's been close to 11 months and I have grown my account from 150 followers to 20k followers. And every month I make an average of 250 USD.
I know this is not a lot of money at this point in time. The main reason for this is I don't have any e-book of my own yet. When you have your own product to offer people tend to buy more than when you're sharing someone else's product. This is because your audience trust you since you have been providing value from a long time.
Also I earn 250 USD / month with very minimal effort. So that's a win for me.
I mainly make this money by selling e-books & through affiliate program on Gumroad. For those who is not aware what an affiliate program is, it's basically you help someone else sell their product & earn a commission.
I Basically Did 3 Things To Get to This Point
- Grow a significant follower base on Twitter
- Provide valuable content for free every single day
- Promote ebooks & affiliate links occasionally
How to grow your account on Twitter is a new blog topic altogether. There are a lot of articles & ebooks available to learn the strategies to grow your account. I will not be discussing this topic in this article.
In this article I mainly want to share strategies that I use (with a good audience) which attracts my audience to buy from the links that I share.
I mainly follow the below 3 strategies.
1. Share My Sale Links in a Viral Tweet
Twitter is a platform where posts tend to go viral when you post a really good tweet or post something on popular topics like JavaScript etc. Although there's no guarantee that two similar tweets will go viral. One of them might fail & the other one can succeed. This totally depends on the Twitter algorithm which nobody knows exactly about.
Anyway after I post something, if I see that the tweet / thread is going viral, i'll immediately create a new tweet with the links I want users to buy from.
For example: One of my tweet went viral recently and see how I attached an affiliate link as a second tweet couple of hours after I realised the tweet was going viral.
Since the tweet has gone viral, I generally get a lot of impressions / views and in turn a lot of link clicks. Although the conversion rate is pretty low I do get some sales.
At the time of writing this article I've got around 13.7k impressions on my sale tweet & 846 link clicks. That means 846 unique users have clicked on the link & have seen the product. If you think about it that's a very good visibility for one tweet without running any ads. Even if I get 1 or 2 sales, I'll make around 12$ - 24$ in commissions and that's a pretty good deal for just 1 tweet which hardly took me a minute to write.
2. Share My Sale Links in My Bio
One of the strategies to build an audience on Twitter is to direct users to your profile by sharing valuable content and commenting on other big accounts. And once the users open your profile the first thing they notice is the bio.
So you should have a killer bio if you want to convert users into your followers. Bio is also a very good place to keep any links that you want the incoming users to check out.
As you can see I have a link to my free e-book in the bio. So when users look at my bio, they will check this & probably download it if they like the product. Since this is a free e-book I don't make any money from it but I do get their emails. Right now I'm trying to build an email list and that's the reason I'm offering a free e-book.
But you get the idea.
You can even keep any sale links here and make money!
3. Keep a Pinned Tweet Which Has My Sale Links
Twitter has this feature where you can pin a particular tweet and it always shows up as the first tweet in your profile. This is another good place to keep any of your sale links as pinned tweet is another important component users look at when they visit your profile.
I have kept a tweet which is basically a thread of all of the affiliate links that I promote.
Smart right?
But Where Can I Get These Affiliate Links?
Excellent question!
There are thousands of people with killer courses on Gumroad and most of them are on Twitter. When you start building your audience you will make friends with people who are in the same niche who are either promoting their own course of some else's (like me!).
Once you find such courses you can contact the course creator and ask them if they're open to add you as an affiliate. Most of the creators will agree. But some creators add only those who have a good enough followers, at least a few thousand.
Once they add you as an affiliate you will get your unique link and you can start sharing those with your audience and start making money!
Important Things To Remember While Sharing Sale Links
Above are the main strategies that I follow on Twitter. But you need to keep some things in mind before sharing the sale links with your audience.
When you build an audience on Twitter, you do it by sharing content in certain niche topics. So make sure the sale links you share come under those niche topics. Otherwise your audience being not interested in the product may see your content as spam and unfollow you.
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Don't do it very frequently. Otherwise your audience can again see your content as spam and unfollow you.
Conclusion
Provide value consistently to build trust which results in people wanting to buy your products.
Tweets which are going viral are goldmine. Don't let them go for a waste. Add a call to action at the end.
Don't share sale links very frequently. Nobody likes to follow someone who is constantly trying to sell them something.
Your bio & pinned tweets are great places to keep sale links. These are the first things users check when they visit your profile. You job is just to get more profile visits.
Having an online presence will definitely benefit you one way or another. Even if making money is not your primary goal, you should still build your online presence.
Many people are making life changing income just through Twitter by selling info products, courses, SaaS etc. Start changing yours today!
The article was originally published on my blog. You can find it here.
We recently started taking pre-orders for our latest e-book:
How to Start a SaaS Company: A Beginner's Guide
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Top comments (4)
I don't understand how you can say that you got those results "with very little efforts".
Didn't you put lots of effort in growing your Twitter account? How many times a day are you on Twitter? How many hours a week? You can say that you have 250$ extra is "for free" only if you think your time and attention aren't valuable.
I think that our time and attention are the most valuable things we have.
Of course it takes a lot of effort into building an online presence. That's why I mentioned "How to grow your account on Twitter is a new blog topic altogether."
Once you have a good online presence it takes minimal effort to make this money!
Many people grow their online presence. But once they do, they have no idea how to monetise their account. The article was mainly addresses this :)
I disagree with this. Posts don't tend to go viral just because they're good (for whoever's definition of good). It's a lot more complicated than that, and for most people, it's something that's never going to happen unless they work the clickbait or make a lot of posts in topical or fashionable areas.
I completely agree. I think that was my thought too, but I didn't put it correctly. Thanks for the correction Ben.