Sponsored Tweets

One of the newest ways to make money online is SponsoredTweets.

This system is easy to set up if you have a Twitter account. Once set up you review and accept offers from advertisers, and agree the tweet content. The Tweet is sent out automatically through your feed, and you then get paid for clicks. If you want to, you can also use it to promote charities wihout making a profit.

I've been trying this one out. So far it's simple and easy to use, but I've run into a small issue: a sense of ethics. I won't review or endorse a product I haven't used, and many advertisers ask you to do that. I also won't endorse gambling, payday loans or certain other activities. This limits the opportunities considerably.

Also, they only offer animated badges as weblinks, which is why you won't find one on this blog.

In short, if you're an established twitter user, it might be worth giving this a look.

• SponsoredTweets

Twitter galore! - Twiends & Tweetdeck

I've signed up with Twiends, a system that is supposed to give you a chance to find people who share your interests on Twitter and get "credits" for following them. Fortunately credits are free (and given my experience I would not suggest paying for them!).

My first attempt at using it left me with a lot of marketers who signed up quickly to get my credits, so I turned it off for a while while I browsed and signed up to follow people I was interested in and blocked or reported most of the rest. I was also slightly concerned about the logistics of following that many people back, since a lot of useful posts can get lost in the noise.

This morning I ran into Twiends again. I set up an account for a client, set up one for me, and turned my other one back on. The results were interesting, to say the least. Basically, whole sets of people are using the "follow everyone" option (easily detected as they all signed up for the three accounts simultaneously).

Since huge chunks of people obviously just want a follow-back and credits (I'll point out I'm not involved in Alaskan oil, and leave it at that), instead of wading through all the people following me to see who to follow, I'll leave it a day, see who unfollows because they've already got the credits for signing up, and then go through the remainder to see who I should follow. Since many of these multiple-sign-ups are using systems that automatically unsubscribe people who don't follow back in 24 hours, it should clear a lot of the spam before I have to deal with it.

I don't use auto-unsubscribe, by the way. If I'm following you, it's because I want to hear what you're saying, not because I expect a followback. I wish more people would extend the same courtesy.

My opinion of Twiends? Well, it defintely does what it says, and gets you followers. How interested those followers are in your topics? That varies. So far I have blocked ten, but have left two and followed two more.

And a very big recommendation to Tweetdeck as the best bit of free software I've found this year. Scheduled Tweets, managing multiple accounts simultaneously, and making it really easy to detect spammers. It will get its own entry shortly, but I've been playing with it for a week now and I'm still finding new ways to shamelessly exploit it.

Opinion of Tweetdeck? Get this one: It's free, it does exactly what it says on the tin, and then more.

A Lotus Update

According to Lotus Central, 15th September 2009, it looks as though Team Lotus are in for the 2010 Forumla One Season (got to love Twitter for breaking news!). My Lotus lens has a link to the full story.

If they are in, then now they just need to live up to the name.

I am currently rather busy trying to finish a manuscript off, but once done I should have a bit more time to tweak some more of my lenses!

Twitter?

Not a new lens, but I am hopefully now signed up to twitter. This blog post, I freely admit, is just a test and I am busy hooking in my squidcasts and bukisa feeds to twitter just to see if anyone's interested - and its all good backlinks even if they aren't!

On the squidoo front, Dragon fans might want to check out http://www.squidoo.com/DragonHatchery - it just gained a way to display your own dragons by an embedding forum. If it gets spammed or abused, I'll remove it, but for the moment feel free to add your dragons!