Tag Archives: revtwt

Amazon Says “No” To Twitter Links

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As more and more affiliates are trying to figure out how to monetize Twitter, one of the largest affiliate programs on earth has decided against it.  Amazon is refusing to pay affiliate commissions on clicks generated from Twitter, citing a clause in the TOS that states that the clicks have to be generated from “your site”.  Since Twitter is not your site, the clicks are invalid (at least according to Amazon).

This seems like an odd move to me, and it”s an even odder move if it becomes a precedent for other websites that will no longer be accepted as legitimate traffic sources.  What does this mean for affiliates that use 3rd party adservers or tracking software so that all the clicks appear to come from a different site than their own?  Will Amazon only be allowing affiliates to place banners on their websites instead of the RSS methods that we have enjoyed up until this point?

I”m assuming that Amazon must have received a bunch of complaints about the links in Twitter as people were tricked into clicking by their “friends”.  This is not really any different then when CPA advertisers declared that they would not accept traffic from MySpace or Facebook messages, bulletins, updates, friend spamming, etc.  There were major lawsuits filed against several companies including Media Breakaway, parent company of affiliate.com.  I suppose it is best if Amazon pulls the plug now instead of waiting for things to get ugly and bringing out the lawyers.

So bottom line, if you have a nice auto blog setup with an RSS feed to your Twitter account, you better pull the Amazon links from it ASAP or you are just burning money.  As far as I know, you can still post eBay Partner Network links, RevTwt links, and CPA links.

It”s not quite back-to-the-drawing-board yet, but it is definitely a sign of things to come.

Real Money On Twitter?

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I was able to sit in on a few of the panel discussions at the first Affiliate Convention in Denver this week, and one of the things that came up over and over again was the power of Twitter.  By now, pretty much everyone in the Internet Marketing world has a Twitter account, but how many people are really making money off of it?

Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker was quite adamant that there is an “imbalance” right now in the realm of monetizing Twitter.  Similar to Facebook and some other new ad platforms when they opened up, he feels like there is a lot of inventory to be had for cheap that can be arbitraged very effectively.  That being said, action needs to be taken now because this won”t last forever!

One of the tools that has come to my attention this week (and was mentioned at the conference) is RevTwt.  One of my friends is a prolific Twitter-holic, and he has played around with putting some RevTwt ads in his feed to make some extra money.  They pay out on a CPC basis, similar to Google AdSense.  This is all well and good, but I think that the real potential to make money with Twitter is in doing the advertising, not the publishing.

You can sign up for an advertiser account at RevTwt and their clicks start extremely cheap, as low as 8 cents.  Any marketer worth his salt should be able to arbitrage that into something that makes much more money.  Maybe some of those campaigns that you have paused because clicks got too expensive on Google?  A campaign that makes you an average of 60 cents per click is a loser if you are paying a dollar a click, but if you are paying 8 cents then it becomes profitable again very quickly!

The thing I like about RevTwt, or just ads in general on Twitter, is that there is a possibility for implicit trust built in for the end users.  If their friends are the ones that are tweeting, they are much more likely to click on the ad because they feel that it is something that was personally recommended.  Couple this with those oh-so-popular Flog landing pages, and you”ve got a potential goldmine.

So there you have it, the time is now, I would love to see more people get out there and experiment with advertising on RevTwt and Twitter!