Ever wondered what makes more money: blog, email or Twitter? I had a chance to test the three channels recently and the results were extremely interesting. I should also note that a few of my Internet marketing friends are calling me nuts to reveal this information for free. But hey, you come to John Chow dot Com to see what I had for lunch and how I make money online.
I’ve shown you what I had for lunch. Now it’s time to show how I make money online. I hope this post opens your eyes a bit and gives you some ideas on where to take your blog next.
Making Money with Twitter
What? Make money with Twitter? How is that possible? I’m glad you asked!
Yes, it is possible to make money with Twitter. As a matter of fact, the Twitter setup is ideally suited for affiliate marketers since all the URLs are cloaked behind a URL shorten service. You don’t really know if the link you’re clicking on is a normal link or an affiliate link.
My money making experiment with Twitter started when I sent the following tweet about the Ultimate Footer Ad out to my followers on March 13.
The tweet produced many questions asking about the product so I followed it up three hours later with this tweet.
The two tweets resulted in $306 of product sales within the first 24 hours. I knew all the sales came as a result of the tweets because I hadn’t blogged about the Footer Ad yet nor had I sent out a newsletter about it.
The results were much better than I expected. I thought maybe I’ll sell a copy or two but I wasn’t expecting Twitter to make $306 overnight!
Making Money with The Blog
I made a blog post about the Ultimate Footer Ad on March 15. The post resulted in $297 of product sales in the first 24 hours. Yes, you read that right. Twitter made more than the blog post in the first 24 hours.
This doesn’t means Twitter makes more money than a blog post because it doesn’t. However, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Making Money with Email
I sent out a newsletter about the Ultimate Footer Ad to all my subscribers on March 17. The mailing resulted in $405 of product sales in the first 24 hours, putting email marketing at the top for this promotion.
The best thing about email marketing is it’s almost instant. I received the first order within five minutes of the email going out. I can see why John Reese calls his email list his ATM. Once your list gets to a decent size, it’s pretty much a cash machine.
Lessons To Take Home
This was one experiment with one product so you should not draw any broad conclusions from it. However, I can make the following observations based on my results.
Twitter Is a Money Maker
Yes, you can make money with Twitter. But like everything else, you have to present the right offer that is targeted at your followship (hey, I made a new word!). If you just spam your Twitter list with stuff your followship is not interested in, you can expect to lose them. Also, your offer needs to be priced right.
I feel the reason Twitter did so well in this test was the price of the product was so low. At $27, the Ultimate Footer Ad was pretty much an impulse purchase. However, were it to cost $270, I doubt it would have resulted in many sales. It’s pretty hard to do a presell with only 140 characters.
If You Don’t Have an Email List, Start One Now
Email marketing works and produce almost instant results. If your blog doesn’t have a way to capture the leads coming to it, then you need to set up a system now. I use Aweber for all my email and newsletter mailings. They are by far the best in the industry.
I’ve seen readers bark that it cost $19 a month to set up an Aweber account but that’s really the wrong way to look at it. What you should be asking is how much is it costing you to not have a newsletter list? There has never been a single month where I didn’t make at least 100 times my monthly newsletter cost. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish.
Blog Is a Long Term Money Maker
Over time, the blog will overtake the income made by Twitter and Email. A blog post has a much longer lifespan and can be indexed by a search engine and therefore receive traffic for months, even years, after the post has been written. By comparison, very few people will ever check someone’s Twitter history and all the emails I’ve sent out about the Footer Ad have been deleted by now.
Your blog is your foundation. However, to maximum its income, you need to add support systems like Twitter and Email. If all I had was the blog post for this promotion, I would have missed out on more than 2/3 of the income I could have made in the first 24 hours.
You should continue working on your blog but you should also work on developing your Twitter community and newsletter subscriptions. If all you have is a blog, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.