Regardless of you feel about monetizing your Twitter, Facebook and other social media profiles this is a very real and potentially valuable revenue stream for bloggers and non-bloggers to potentially make some extra money to pay bills. I literally make enough to pay my Netflix and Gamefly subscriptions every month just from sharing some sponsored content on my social media profiles and I recommend them for anyone who is interested in earning an extra $10 – $50 per month, especially with the holidays coming up.
Here are some of the programs I have tried and how you can monetize and leverage them.
MyLikes
MyLikes is brought to you by some of the minds who worked for Google and the application launched in January 2010. It is one of the only programs where you can earn from FaceBook, Posterous, Tumbler, Friendfeed, Blogger.com and WordPress.com in addition to Twitter. Recently I met someone who doesn’t even have a Twitter profile and makes $40 per month just from their Facebook profile.
MyLikes lets you share sponsored/advertiser content and earn per click, but you can also find and submit your own likes and earn per click from liking virtually anything you select in the system. This allows you to promote just the products, services and companies you like and earn from people checking them out.
SponsoredTweets
SponsoredTweets specifically targets promoting on your Twitter social network and earns me the most money out of any other program. I have earned over $120 in the past year and that is with turning down another $150 in potential revenue because I didn’t want to promote those products. You can earn CPC like MyLikes and anyone can participate, but the real money is when advertisers directly hire you to tweet content and you can earn as much as $2.00 or more for a single tweet. If you have even 500 twitter followers you can make $10 per month, but if you have thousands of followers you can really earn here.
Ad.ly
Ad.ly is another program that allows you to earn from Twitter, Facebook or Myspace profiles by sharing sponsored content on these social networks. With Ad.ly you list in the system select what categories to put your profiles into and wait for an advertiser to hire you. You get to approve or decline any advertisers so you have control over what you promote.
Magpie
Magpie pays in euro’s but has the potential to earn you more than other programs if you have a prolific Twitter following. With MagPie you can accept Pay Per Click, Pay Per View, Pay Per Lead or Pay Per Sale programs to increase your earning potential. You can set to manually approve sponsored content or automate it so you don’t have to bother checking and approving and you just earn without any direct interaction on your part. (I highly recommend you approve each advertiser recommendation for quality assurance).
Twtbuck
Twtbuck is yet another program that pays you to promote on Twitter, you sign up and then it estimates your price per tweet. The program is different in that they ask you to send out normal tweets through their Twitter interface and based on keywords in your tweets advertiser opps will match and be offered to you. When testing I didn’t find any high quality or paying advertisers more than 1 penny per tweet and my account estimates my tweets are worth $11 per tweet. So far I can’t honestly recommend this program like the others, but I have only been testing it for a few days.
WeReward
WeReward is IZEA’s mobile application for iPhone, Android or Blackberry that allows you to earn money by checking into local businesses. If you are already using FourSquare and do checkins, this allows you to actually make money by checking into local companies that are participating.
More Programs
If some of my readers are using programs that I have not mentioned above feel free to share them, I have reviewed some that I felt weren’t worth it but I have by no means explored everything. I am always curious to see what exists that I haven’t found yet here.
Lastly, many people can earn money just by sharing Amazon.com affiliate or their favorite ClickBank, CommisionJunction affiliate links on Twitter. These don’t pay per click of course, somebody has to buy a product but for the Amazon.com one if somebody just clicks the link it sets a cookie and if they buy anything from amazon.com for the duration of the cookie you get the affiliate sale commission.
These are my tips for monetizing Social Media accounts, and I hope some of you find them helpful.