In this guide on how to make money on Twitter, you’ll learn all about:

• Different angles to make money on Twitter
• How to sell on Twitter
• What to sell
• Selling someone else’s product
• How to set your profile up to make money
• Creating your own product
• What price you should ask
• Using tools to maximize your revenue
• Lots and lots more

 

So if you want to make money on Twitter, this guide should give you a ton of value.

Chapter 1. Different angles to make money on Twitter

Some people think the only thing you can sell on Twitter is to promote your own blog or eCommerce store and hope people will click through and buy your stuff. They’re missing out on a whole world of ways to make money on Twitter.

What is selling on Twitter?

Basically, it’s creating demand for a product or service through tweets and adding a link to the product in your tweet so people can click through and buy the thing you promote.

Your audience isn’t very likely to buy from you if the only thing you tweet about is “buy my sh*t”. They are however very likely to buy from you if you show them why your product is valuable. Twitter is great for this.

Real-world examples to make money on Twitter

We’ll start off with things you can do when you already have a big following. Brands big and small are paying influencers on Twitter and other social media platforms for shout-outs. They will mention you in their Tweet, Instagram, or Facebook post.

Sell your tweet as ad space

You simply tweet something and disclose to your audience that this is an ad. In most (if not all?) modern countries it’s mandatory to disclose that you’re actually advertising a product.

If you don’t it’s not that Twitter will come after you but the local authorities for not disclosing your partnerships.

Here’s an example of an account that does just that. @IamDevloper is an account with over 350k followers. A huge account with a following that is very engaged with his tweets.

He sells ads for $1,000 per tweet! This is an example of an ad he tweeted a while back. He discloses the fact this is an ad with the money emoji which he also mentioned in his profile bio.

????

If there was any desk I’d want to bang my head against during 3 hours of sprint planning, it’d be this one https://t.co/MGnZsSpCMQ from @autonomousdotai #standingdesk #autonomous #smartdesk

— I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) March 17, 2020

If you don’t want to go and haggle with people on Twitter about prices and what to tweet, you can use services like Adly, SponsoredTweets, and Upfluence.

Where Adly is a system that will offer you tweets in exchange for money without the need to build real relationships. As an influencer, you should be involved in the brands that want to advertise with you. You need to keep your authority and your integrity when advertising for brands.

Upfluence is a service that offers a more long-term look on selling yourself on Twitter (or any social media platform for that matter). If you’re in this for the long run, you should consider playing the game a bit differently and don’t go for hit-and-run deals that make you a little bit of money but don’t create a long-lasting relationship.

Sell other people’s products (as an affiliate)

Probably the most well-known affiliate program in the world is Amazon’s affiliate program. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have created websites where they promote products on Amazon.

Meanwhile, Amazon has been slowly but steadily decreasing its commissions to their affiliates.

The great thing about being an affiliate is that you don’t have to create a (physical) product. The bad thing is that you’re always dependent on someone else. If they decide to stop selling the product or slash the commission rate, you have a big problem.

While commissions rates on Amazon range anywhere from 1% to 10%, commissions can be a lot higher if you look in a different direction.

A lot of people are selling their products through Gumroad. Gumroad is an online store. You can just upload your virtual product, set a price, and start selling. They take care of the payment processing. You only have to connect your PayPal account and get paid every week.

There are a lot of people who give commissions up to 50% when you sell one of their products on Gumroad. A $30 product means you’ll earn $15 in commissions when someone buys it through your affiliate link.

There are also many alternatives for Gumroad. Like Sellfy, Payhip, and Sendowl. All doing more or less the same.

Sell your own product

The most interesting way to make money on Twitter is by selling your own dog food. One angle to selling your own product on Twitter is through “Info-products”. These are ebooks and video courses that teach people something.

Daniel Vasallo has been doing a great job selling his courses through Gumroad.

This tweet received 105K impressions and made $16,768 in direct sales from 6,312 link clicks. That’s $2.65 per click. https://t.co/65i9FkCbvC

— Daniel Vassallo (@dvassallo) May 3, 2020

But before you can sell your own dog food, you have to build trust. We’ll get into that later on.

Make money by promoting your website

If you have a blog or commerce store, Twitter can be a nice way to drive traffic and ultimately revenue to your website. But just like any other social media, Twitter also doesn’t like links that leave their real estate. Twitter’s algorithm is primed to give tweets with external links fewer impressions.

There’s no hard evidence for this yet but we assume that, even though a link click is a form of engagement on your tweet, Twitter much more prefers likes, RT’s, and comments.

Whenever you share a link to your website, try not to just share the URL with a dull caption. Add value to people’s timelines in the tweet itself. Everyone is lazy. Before people click through to your website they want some juice upfront.

Neil Patel did that really nice in this tweet here:

The top 10 Employee COVID-19 Concerns were straightforward… until I read #3. Blew me away. See how your people really feel. https://t.co/hNc09n3ySy

— Neil Patel (@neilpatel) April 7, 2020

He’s giving people a reason to read it because he thought it was really insightful and he creates FOMO because he mentions something that you can only know when you click the link.

Whatever you do: Don’t (over)sell

An important thing to add here is to not oversell on your timeline. This will hurt your growth and money-making potential in the future.

How?

Because people who don’t yet follow you will first visit your profile to check you out. If the only thing they see is promotional tweets they’re not very likely to follow you.

What can you do to still sell while not over-promoting your content?

Burry your sales tweets in carefully crafted tweets specifically designed to get people interested in your (affiliates’) product.

Start with an insight. What did you learn from the product you want to sell without mentioning it?

Jay does this well with many of his tweets. Here’s a pretty simple one (he teaches you how to make money with affiliate marketing on Twitter)

While you sleep.

While you eat.

While at work.

While at church.

The affiliate sales notifications come. pic.twitter.com/02L0LL2LJb

— Jay ⚡️ (@Jay_Rembert_) May 1, 2020

Chapter 2. How to sell on Twitter

In this chapter, I’m going to cover different angles to make money on Twitter. Either by selling your own stuff or by selling other people’s stuff.

How can you sell on Twitter?

Most people when they start selling on Twitter, start selling someone else’s product. They become an affiliate. As an affiliate, you earn commissions when someone buys a product you referred.

It’s easy because you don’t have to create the product itself. You just do the selling, the marketing part. But it’s also not sustainable. If you stop selling, if you stop promoting others, your commissions will fall flat. You won’t make any more money.

When you have an existing audience (as in more than a few hundred followers) but you don’t know what you could sell them, start as an affiliate. You’ll figure out how to create your own product down the road.

If you have an audience AND you know what to sell, you can still act as an affiliate to other people. This can also increase the sales you make on your own product. Why? Because if you become someone else’s affiliate, they’re also very likely to become yours. Especially when you sell matching (non competing) products.

When you don’t have an audience and you don’t know what to sell… Well, you better start building an audience first. Here’s a guide on how to grow your Twitter followers.

Lastly, if you don’t have an audience but do know exactly what to sell, you can just create it and sell it. I’ll show you how in this guide.

Become someone’s affiliate

If you want the biggest array of things to sell on Twitter you can apply to the Amazon Associates Program. With a few clicks, you’ll be ready to promote millions of products albeit at a very very small (and ever-shrinking) commission.

You could tweet about a book you recently read, which gave you lots of value and add an affiliate link to Amazon to your tweet. To make any actual money, you need a huge following or a viral tweet. So while it’s easy to get started with Amazon, it’s not at all easy to earn a living with it.

Gumroad doesn’t have a directory where you can look at that shows which of their creators are open to having affiliates promote their products. You have to find them yourself.

Follow people who have similar interests that sell on Gumroad

Use a service like Followerwonk to see who’s talking about Gumroad on their profile. You can locate people who have similar interests and who’re very likely to allow you to become an affiliate.

You can do the same type of searches for the Gumroad alternatives like Sellfy, Payhip, and Sendowl.

Once you’ve found people who are selling digital products already, you have to come into contact with them. Most people with big followings have their DMs disabled for people they’re not following. An easy way to come into contact with them is to reply to one of their sales tweets that you like dot become their affiliate.

Their sales tweets are an important part of the reason they’re on Twitter so chances are high they’ll send you a DM with more info.

If they don’t respond, don’t overdo it. Maybe they have enough affiliates already or think you’re just a hit ’n run person who they don’t want to have contact with.

Either way: focus on adding value to their timeline. Comment on their tweets. Quote them the RT. That will get them to notice you. Try your question again after a couple of weeks. They’ll probably change their minds if they see you’re serious.

Decide on your niche

If you don’t decide what niche you’re going to sell things in, you’re never going to be successful.

You can pick anything you like really. There’s a market for everything. What’s more important is that you pick something you enjoy and know a lot about. You can’t sell something as an apprentice. You have to have some level of experience and knowledge about a topic before you can teach others.

Once you do know enough about a certain topic, you’re good to go.

If you don’t know what niche you want to go in, you’re simply not ready to create your own product yet. Focus on becoming an affiliate for others. Learn from them and once you know your stuff, create your own product.

Don’t copy, (spin) and paste

Too many people on Twitter are just plain copycats. They buy someone else’s course. Read it and create their own course based on the one they just bought.

Don’t do that. People will find out.

Why?

Many people buy multiple courses on the same topics. If they download yours and find it similar to the one they already bought, you’re going to have a pleasant party on Twitter. They’ll call you out as a fraud or contact the person from who you copied the work. If you’re their affiliate they’ll probably remove you from their affiliate list and you’ve lost a lot more than you gained.

Always be original. Always make your own product.

It’s easy to bury yourself into something and see nothing else besides the thing you just read. When you’re able to zoom out and see what’s missing, that’s the moment you’ll create original products that sell and will create a following.

You can sell these types of products

In this guide, we’re (almost) exclusively focusing on digital products. In this part of the guide, we’re only mentioning digital products. Why? Because it’s easier to create and easier to sell.

The main categories are:

• Audio
• Writing
• Video
• Creative art (which comes in many shapes and sizes)

 

People pay you to teach them, amuse them, save them time, and just, in general, to “add” something to their lives.

What you can sell on audio

If you’re into music you can do all sorts of angles here. Teach people how to sing. Sell (exclusive) songs. Sound effects. Music lessons. Meditation lessons. Etc.

I don’t know much about music but if you’re into the music scene, have your own keyboard or are an (up n coming) DJ, you probably know exactly what people are looking for.

As a musician (in any way shape or form) you normally trade your time for money. You give someone a guitar lesson and they pay you. Easy transaction. On the Internet, it’s a different game.

You create a Guitar Course with 20 hours of audio and people will pay you $100 for it. Now, if you only sell one course, the numbers won’t be enticing. But if you just sell 50 copies of your course, the numbers are totally different.

When you create an audio course or audio files, think about what you can make that is still as relevant tomorrow (read: next years) as it is today.

You can only sell your hour once. If you create an (audio) asset at that same time you can keep selling it over and over.

What you can sell with your writing

You can go really broad here. You could create something on any topic you can think of.

If you like to cook you can create recipes and package them in an ebook. If you’re an expert in a subject you can write a course about it.

Many people have blogs where they’ve written extensively about topics they know a lot about. If this is you, You can repackage your blog into an ebook and sell it instead of relying on Google to bring you traffic and hopefully convert some of that traffic to a paying user.

People will gladly pay you for the information you already put out for free. Just make it juicier. Lose the fluff and jam-pack it with a lot of flavors. Knowing how to create a great-looking ebook helps a lot with that too.

What you can sell through videos

When you look at how valuable one form or the other is, video is the most valuable. People are just willing to pay less for audio and ebooks/courses.

Anything you can sell with your writing, you can sell with video too. People will just pay more.

How-to video guides are especially great to sell on Twitter.

Cut up portions of your video course into small parts and upload it as a native Twitter video (it gets more impressions). Get people interested in it with these kinds of previews. People already know a little bit what they’ll get when they buy and you’ll have tweets that get a lot of engagement because you’re giving away a lot of value.

The most important lesson here is that because there’s such high demand for a video you have to choose your niche. You can create a video course on how to grow your blog. But you can probably sell more if you create specific courses for food bloggers and travel bloggers.

Nobody wants a one-size-fits-all course. They want something that is tailored to their needs and wants. There’s already so much out there and they’ve already watched quite a bit already too. So you have to create content that is tailored to an audience.

Chapter 3. How to set up your profile to make more money

Once you have your product ready or you’ve become an affiliate for someone, you can set up your profile which will help you sell more.

There are a couple of things you can do to improve the sales.

• Your header
• Your bio
• Your location
• Your website
• Your pinned tweet

Prime people to buy with your header

You need a couple of things before you can sell a product (besides the actual product ;-). You need to have authority and credibility.

Both can be shown (off) in your header.

What are your accomplishments? What did you do that no one else has? What’s the reason people should follow you or buy from you?

Don’t put big $$$ signs in your header and point people to your product. Do be a bit promotional about your accomplishments.

Tell people more about yourself in your bio

The bio is probably the second or third thing people see when they visit your profile (just after they looked at your header and profile pic).

Tell visitors of your profile what they can expect to see from you. This is also the place you can start telling about what you do and what product(s) you created.

I wouldn’t overdo it here. Always remember that you don’t want to be overly promoting. Twitter is a “pull” medium. You pull people in with enticing content. Not with sales talk.

Followers also don’t appear out of nowhere. You don’t “get” followers. You earn them. You earn their trust, you earn theirs follow. You earn their follow, they’re more likely to buy from you down the line.

Use your location as a call to action

As you can see I’ve added a “location” to my Twitter profile. It’s just not a real location. You can enter anything you want in there. Just not all kinds of crazy characters. But you can use it to entice people to click on your link. That link can be a direct link to your Gumroad product or to your website of course. It’s just a simple tweak you can use.

Your website

This one is pretty straightforward. You can enter any URL you like. If you want to measure how many people click on it make sure you use something like Google UTM tagging or use a link shorter that lets you measure how many clicks you got.

You can use bit.do to shorten your links. You’ll notice that not as many people click on your website link as people will on other links like your:

Pinned tweet

A pinned tweet is just that. You can pin any of your tweets to the top of your profile. It’s something you want to showcase or a tweet that does really well engagement-wise.

To pin a tweet just click on the little downward triangle and select “Pin to your profile” from the drop-down menu.

Chapter 4. How to create your first product

Because there’s such a huge diversity in things you can create to sell as a product, it’s no use to go in very deep on product creation because it probably won’t be very relevant for you.

That’s why I’m sticking to some more general advice almost anyone can use when you want to create your own product.

What’s the goal of your product?

For anyone to download and use your product you need to sell the goal. The value. If people completed your course, downloaded your product, what can they do with it?

You need this for two reasons. The first is because you want to entice people to buy your product with a clear value proposition. If you buy this, you will get that.

The second reason is that you don’t want people to ask you for refunds. You want them to create raving reviews about your product. Because you might start selling to your direct contacts but that pool of people will quickly dry up. You need to show credibility in the form of those reviews and tweets mentioning lots of love for you and your product.

If people download your product and they can’t reach the goal that you promised them, you’re going to be in trouble.

Who’s your audience?

When you know your goal you need to know who you’re selling to. Where do they live? How old are they? Where can you reach them?

Once the product is done the fun starts. It isn’t over when you’ve created your product. The journey of your product has only just started.

The second reason why you need to define your audience is that you want to define what they already know.

If I were to make a course SEO for you I could create a beginner course where I need to really think through what I knew when I just started out and what I didn’t. But if I make an expert course I don’t need to consider all those things. I just have to consider what people who have a similar experience level have.

The bigger the gap between who you’re selling and who YOU are currently, the harder it is to connect to your audience.

That’s because the expert in you will assume your audience knows a lot already when they don’t. You’ll miss a lot of your basics.

Create a product that’s one step below your current level. The more your write, the more you record, the more you’ll learn.

Once you reach the next step, you can create a new product that will help your audience reach a new level.

This works great because it’s natural for your audience to grow with you. They also follow a path of learning and doing. So when you just start out creating a product you’ll have a bunch of “noobs” (I’m exaggerating) following you. You can’t sell expert products to people who don’t have an expert level. You need to sell apprentice-level products.

What format to choose?

We already talked about audio, writing, and video and the different values people assign to those different formats. If you want to earn the most money you should choose video.

I also think it’s a lot easier to make a video-based product because it doesn’t have to look fantastic.

Courses created as ebooks sell really well too and it’s not like you’ll lose out on a lot of money if you just create text-only products. You do have to put a lot more time into the process.

Spell checking. Sentence flow. Structure. Those are the usual suspects. But I also see a lot of people on Twitter sell ebooks that are really poorly formatted. They use standard Word formatting. Poor use of graphics. Not really enticing to read and keep reading. That means fewer people will reach their (and your) goal when they download your product.

That means fewer raving reviews and fewer people mentioning that they love what you did.

What price range should you aim for?

This question can only be answered by: it depends.

How big is your following? How high is your credibility? Have you created products before? How many people reviewed it? Can you justify a higher price this time?

Maybe even more important is the question: how much are people willing to pay for this.

For an ebook, you can charge anywhere from $0 to $99. Video courses can go as high as $1000.

But if this is the first product you’ll create. Aim safe. Deliver $100 of value and ask about 5x – 10x less than the value you provide.

Don’t be scared to raise your prices. People do it all the time.

Don’t overdo it either 🙂 I think the sweet spot for ebook-based courses is around the $18 – $40 range. Anything more and it will be a lot harder to sell. Anything less and you won’t be taken seriously.

Chapter 5. What tools you can use to promote your sales on Twitter

To start off with you can use Hypefury of course!! 🙂 Go try it for free here. Just connect your Twitter account and you can start your first sale in minutes!

You can use Hypefury in a number of ways to sell (more).

Sell without being salesy, the Hypetweet

I mentioned before that you don’t want your timeline to be riddled with promotions for your products. But you also want to sell your product.

What to do, what to do?

Just keep tweeting as you normally would. Schedule your tweets with Hypefury of course 😉 But add Hypetweets.

Hypetweets are tweets that are automatically plugged into your tweet once a certain engagement threshold has been met.

Let’s say you normally get around 2 – 5 RTs on your tweets. Probably 1,000 – 2,000 people see that tweet.

The Hypetweet feature lets you select a number of RTs and likes as a threshold. Once that’s met we automatically attach a new tweet to that tweet that’s already doing great. You could be asleep when your tweet goes viral and you’d miss out on all those people that would have otherwise seen your promotional tweet.

The only thing you need to do is come up with a follow-up tweet that aligns with the original tweet. That way it’s just an organic way for you to show people the road to your product instead of being overly aggressive and having your products littered across your timeline.

People who are and who have engaged with that tweet are more likely to see the Hypetweet tweet making it even more relevant.

We’ve seen a lot of creative ways to use the Hypetweet. Our users have been giving gifts when their tweets reach a certain engagement threshold. It’s a win-win.

We’ve seen users give away discount codes. We’ve seen them giving away sneak peeks into new products. You can do all sorts of cool stuff including giveaways.

Sell Gumroad products while you sleep (or watch the money enter your account on autopilot)

On our Premium plan, we have a special feature that allows you to create a Gumroad sale. That in itself is not really interesting. We just need you to connect your Gumroad account to Hypefury and we’ll create a coupon code for you.

What is interesting is that you can limit the number of copies on sale (thus creating a sense of urgency) and you can set a sales window creating even more urgency.

What do you think people are going to do when they see: Just 3 copies left? Or: this sale will close in just a couple of hours? They won’t think twice and click the “I want this” button on Gumroad. Give it a try now.

In this video, we share even more tips on how to make money on Twitter