Twitip

The following is Part 5 of a series of posts by Crystal N. Woods, from
Conscious Evolution, Success and Self Esteem (Follow her @CrystalsQuest) You can also read Part 1 – Journaling, Part 2 – Link Lists,  Part 3 – Conversations, and Part 4 – Thought Leadership.

Making money online is not only one of the most frequent topics in blogging, it’s also one of the hottest searches on any search engine, and it’s becoming ever more popular on twitter too.

I’ve left this topic until now because most of the people who start out with the sole objective of creating money making blogs, and more recently twitter accounts, do tend to be a bit obvious.  If they succeed, they also tend to get short-lived success, mostly along the lines of niche blogs – they build one tiny area up to be profitable, then move on to another area.  We’re seeing something similar on twitter where people are setting up multiple accounts.

Trend-surfing this way may get you a few big wins, or enough small ones to support yourself, but it isn’t the same as being one of the big-guns of blogging, earning 6 or 7 figures a year in stable and ever increasing income.  There are very, very few of those (and they all have big followings, as I mentioned in the last post).  While the average income for blogs in 2008 was $6,000, that was influenced heavily by the top 1% of bloggers who earnt $200k plus.  Look at the top 10%, and the average income is down to only $19k.

You may be surprised to know that most of the blogging big names didn’t start out earning their income that way.  In fact, very few of them earnt their livelihood from blogs to start with.  Some of them, like Cris Brogan and Robert Scoble, still have offline jobs. Darren Rowse of Problogger paid his bills with multiple part time jobs while he built his blog up to the level where it would support himself, and kept going from there to the income levels of today. Yaro Starak of Entrepreneurs-Journey supported himself with an editing business and a gamers site before he grew big enough to earn a full time income from blogging.  David Risley of davidrisley.com (Confessions of a 6 Figure Blogger) has made his income online for years, but when he started most of that income came from consulting work, not blogging.

Every single one of these Blogging-Income Masters say the same thing: you don’t get that level of income unless you treat it seriously.  Blogging is a business.  If you want to turn it into your income, you need to have a Business Plan.

Twitter is the same.

There are no shortage of ways to turn blogging into an income, although not quite so many on twitter yet. Already, though, the “Make Money with Twitter” offers are starting to flood in. A lot of them are going to make money for the people selling them, and not many others. The tried and true methods that have worked for the top names in blogging, though, are summarised below:

Have a plan. It’s as true on twitter as it is elsewhere. Failing to plan = planning to fail.

Build a list. Yes, twitter is a list of sorts, but if your follower has 348 other people tweeting at the same time, your update will be all too fleeting. Convert them to your mailing list, or at the very least your blog’s rss feed!  Remember: the money’s in the list.

Over-deliver on value. Your followers are not going to throw money at you just because you put your hand out for it – especially not as any kind of sustainable income. Prove to them that you deliver the goods, and they’ll think of you down the track when they need what you have to offer.

Build a reputation. The trust and credibility people give you is the equivalent of brakes to your online income. If you don’t have much, you won’t get much. I saw a tweet not long ago by a well known social media expert on how someone with a tiny fraction of his follower count was trying to sell him a system to build more followers. Needless to say, there was zero credibility there.

Find out what your followers want. The way to make money is to offer solutions. You can’t do that until you know what problems people are facing, and decide which of them you have the skills and know-how to help them overcome.

Be Consistent and Persistent. This feeds back into all of the above.  If you’ve created a plan, make sure you follow it – it’s sad but true that the majority of people give up before they succeed. Keep taking action past the point where others drop out, and you win the race by default.