Tweet me the money!

So I was thinking the other day regarding Twitter and the ways it would be possible to earn money. Both from the company perspective, though also from the perspective of an end-user. Sure, for an end-user you have the option of pushing out advertisments and have a large enough crowd following you so that you are able to earn something. But then again, by the time your following crowd is big enough to earn you anything decent, in my books – it would be the same as sending out tons of spam mails and hope that someone falls for it. No, in my eyes the better way for an end-user to use Twitter to earn money would be to actually use it to promote content and posts that you write and let your knowledge earn the money for you. Sure – it won’t happen over the night, but let it build up over time and you would indeed be able to earn something.

Some time ago I performed an experiment, I setup a system that automatically pushed my new posts to networks like Facebook, Twitter and others upon publishing. Now, the results from that test period is now actually starting to shape up. At the first, I didn’t get as much new visitors as I had hoped for, but I said to myself “give it time”. So I continued to write articles, published my projects and surely, slowly people started to click the tweets, the facebook publications and such – and you know, now they started to come back regulary. Now I am steadily recieving 50-100 unique visitors pr. day and thats in a month. By the same time as I initiated this project, I also setup a “scam-project”, a blog with the entire purpose of pushing out ads. The interresting part is that in the beginning I got more visitors and hits there, but now after 3 months of testing this main project have surpassed the scam-project, and generates more hits and visitors. Sure, no surprise there you might say – but as I said, the interresting part is that the first 1.5 month I had more visitors and hits on the scam-project on mere ads.

To conclude this little project of mine, it just proves – as I told you before I did this project Mr. A, but here you have it, I did the project, and now it can be concluded, knowledge and information is alpha and omega in making a blog stand out from the crowd. Sure, I don’t have -that- many visitors compared to bigger blogs, but given the timeframe and the effort put into it, I must say I am satisfied.

Now, as I started out with – this is just some mere thougts on the end-user part. What I really do think is the main thing for Twitter as a company, would be to use the vast amount of data flowing through their systems daily to predict questions. I am quite fond of the idea of deep-web searching and the information that you can find on the internet if you just dig through it. It’s proven that what might seem as random data if you just take a glimpse at it, put in a larger context could very well let you know whom would be the next president. Sure, other social networks sits on quite a bit of information too, but their strength is the targetted advertisements as they already know what there is to know about you, what you like, what your friends like and such. Twitter in its nature is used far more frequently and contains data that you could analyse and put into real use.

Ordinary search engines can help you find the needle in the haystack; but what if we want to know what is around the needle; check out the haystack, find out what other things might be in the same haystack. Come up with a system that can tell you what are the most probably outcome of the next election, and you have a system that is worth more than money itself.

Update 2009-03-23

It’s nice to see that others now are picking up on this topic.