I recently started using twitter and realized that setting up accounts with keywords was a brilliant way to lock out my competition in certain verticals. The next part of the equation was how to monetize the twitter account.
* Direct Advertisement – If a lot of people are following you in twitter or in other words if you have a wide reach to a large number of twitter users, you can look into direct advertisements for monetization.
* Recommendation You can recommend a particular product or service on behalf of your advertisers & peruse your followers to take an action.
* Promotion You can help your advertiser to promote a new product or service to your twitter followers. I have found a huge increase in my Google analytics where twitter is the referring site.
Twitter works like niche marketing, if you are an Internet Marketer, most of your followers in Twitter are probably from the same sphere of influence which is why they have followed you in the first place.
# Affiliate Marketing I was listening to Shoemoneys podcast from webmasterradio.fm where he talked about how affiliate marketing can actually be blended within Twitter.
* Affiliate Links If you are recommending a product or a service to your followers, you can always embed your affiliate link in your tweet. (e.g. Using a service like TinyUrl.com)
* Sales Pages Instead of taking your followers to another website using your affiliate link, you might just want to promote your own product & services and sell them directly via your sales / landing page.
# Paid Review This is pretty much like the direct advertisement, however the only difference would be, instead of blindly suggesting a product or a service to someone, you can actually do some paid reviews. Similar to Blogvertise and other paid inclusion sites.
* Product Paid review about a particular product (e.g. Internet Marketing software)
* Services Paid review on services that your advertiser offers. (E.g. Mortgage, Auto, pick any affiliate niche)
* People Paid review about people. You can review someones web design skills, or you may promote someones twitter account for instance.
# Sponsored Contest An advertiser may want to run a contest via a popular twitter user to get feedback about his product & services or just to create some brand awareness. (gearing up to the buzz marketing campaign)
* Feedback Example – What New features would you like to see in Product A?
* Brand Awareness Example- Describe product X in 140 Characters or Tell us why you like product X within 140 Characters. The best answer can be given a cool prize sponsored by the advertiser.