Work at Home Grandmothers

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Sponsored Tweets. All opinions are 100% mine.

I do a few things to bring in extra income as a woman who works at home. Just a few weeks ago I was able to transfer $50.00 into my PayPal account because I’ve been doing a little “tweeting” for different advertisers that I’m connected to by IZEA.

How is this done?

1. First you have to be a member of Twitter and have a following, the more followers you have, the more appealing you will be to potential advertisers.
2. Next you are going to want to  sign up for sponsored tweets which isn’t hard to do at all.
3. After you have signed up for your account (much of the sign up information you will provide is in the image below), and have it “connected” to your Twitter account (this all happens automatically as you go through the sign up process), you will wait for advertisers to discover you and offer you things to tweet about.

How do you know you have been offered an opportunity?  You will be contacted by email or through a Direct Message on Twitter, your choice, and will have a few days to respond by either accepting or refusing the offer.

Something I like is the disclosure feature that they have, within each tweet you are required to include a word that indicates that the tweet is an ad, sponsored, etc., you can choose which word you want to include within your tweet if you choose to write your own tweets…oh yes, that’s another thing…you can choose to have the sponsor write the tweet, or you can write your own, I write my own.

Then you send your “tweet” through the sponsored tweet site for approval by the advertiser, and they are “tweeted” for you when approved.  You receive a message by email letting you know what is happening each step of the way.

There is also a new “API”, to be honest with you, I’m still learning about that one.  But you’ll find out all you need to know at the site.  There are quite a few celebrity “tweeters” using the site, like Leann Rimes, Bob Vila and more.

So take a little time to check this out…bit by bit the money builds up, and before you know it, you have enough to transfer to your account.  It’s so easy!

The latest Twitter statistics are out, and even though I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Twitter this week due to outages caused by the hacker that shut down Twitter for a day or two, it’s still one of my favorite ways to network. 

I thought I’d share some of statistics with you, and a thought or two on how they might affect your business communications on Twitter…now realize the study was done over a 10 day period…and I hope not within the past week - just kidding

1. 40% of tweets are pointless statements of fact, stating what the person happened to be doing at the moment, like “I’m eating a cookie”, “I’m watching television” etc.
2. 39% were conversational tweets, and take place between 2 - 4 pm…what time zone I don’t know, but the report I heard was on the east coast.
3. % of Spam and self-promotion is quite low
4. News Media tweets peeked at about 2 pm Tuesdays
5. Retweets took place most often on Monday mornings

I’m not sure how relevant all of this Twitter trivia is, but knowing when the most conversation is taking place was surprising to me.  I tend to spend my time on Twitter in the evenings, perhaps it would be better to visit during the afternoon hours when there is conversation going on.

One thing I know for sure is that if you want to promote your business, you have to first take time to share yourself, and I mean sincerely, not just to get, people will see right through that.  

A mistake I made early on was to set up my blogs with “Twitterfeed” so that each post to my blogs was automatically posted to Twitter…and I never conversed at all…definitely wasn’t a good idea, any more than blasting out phrases like ”Made $1000 in my first week” etc…posts like that may bring in some, but don’t appeal to me at all.  I still use Twitterfeed, but spend a good bit of time conversing, too, and only have Twitterfeed tweet my posts every 24 hours.

It is possible to converse in 140 characters…take some time watching conversation,  ”follow” people you enjoy and hope that they will follow you back, you can “tweet” a person that is not “following” you, but you can’t send them a Direct Message.  Jump in and say hi.  Check your “replies” (if you tweet from your Twitter home page, you’ll find your “replies” in the right column where you see your username with a @ in front of it, in my case that would be @happynutrition) and “Direct Messages” regularly and respond…you can reply any time, even if the person who wrote to you isn’t online tweeting at the moment, they’ll see it when they check in again.

Do you have a Twitter business success story to share?  Please share in a comment!

Related Posts:

Networking With Grandmothers on Twitter

Wall Street Journal Article on Twitter

Twittering Grandmothers

I made a discovery today while I was working/playing with a Squidoo lens. Do you know what Squidoo is? It’s another way of quickly and easily getting your “presence” out there on the web. You can make what they call a “lens”  about things that interest you, things you’re working on, just about anything you can think of. You can see what I have done if you visit my profile page on Squidoo.

One of the pages I did was “Find a Grandmother or Grandmothers on Twitter“.  Stop by for a visit and learn more about using hashtags (#) and which word, “Grandmother” or “Grandmothers” is the best search term.  I hope to add more helpful information, and perhaps more about how to use Squidoo to your benefit on this blog.

You can still sign up to hear the following FREE seminars to help you build your business. Below is a list of what’s happening today, Thursday, April 30th…for more information and sign-up details, click here.

EVENT: Bernadette Doyle Rapid Profit Boosters Interview
DATE & TIME: Thursday, April 30th at 12:00pm Eastern
TOPIC: How To Promote PROFITABLE Workshops, Seminars, Training Courses and Teleseminars That SELL OUT Every Time

EVENT: Jeff Mulligan Rapid Profit Boosters Interview
DATE & TIME: Thursday, April 30th at 2:00pm Eastern
TOPIC: QuickieProfits: Quick Tips, Tricks and Tactics to Boost Web Profits

EVENT: Mari Smith Rapid Profit Boosters Interview
DATE & TIME: Thursday, April 30th at 8:00pm Eastern
TOPIC: Social Marketing Business. In this interview, you will learn how to use the top two online social networks - Facebook and Twitter to significantly increase your profits!

Again, to sign up for this free event, click here.

Today I found an article in the WALL STREET JOURNAL written by Julia Angwin with some nice tips to add to the ones that you will find in my previous post on the subject.

In the article she shares a “Twitter Glossary”, some were shared in the previous post, but here goes in my own words:

• @ is the symbol you put in front of the name of someone you are replying to, if you are working directly from the twitter site (not using software like TweetDeck, etc.) you can “click” on this symbol next to any “tweet” you want to reply to and the symbol and name will go into the message window, in my browser you can’t see the @ until you “hover” your mouse pointer over it to the right of each “tweet”.
• DM or direct message is a message you can send privately to a person, usually you have to visit their page and click on “message…” in the right column.
• RT stands for “retweet”.  If you like something someone said, you can copy and paste their message and put RT in front of it…you’ll gain friends/followers if you “retweet” their posts, but make sure they are worth “retweeting”….be sure to include their username w/ @ in front of it.
• # or the “hashtag” is something you put before a term you want to be searchable.  The advantage is that the term after the hashtag will be “clickable” and anyone who clicks on the word/letters/etc. following the hash tag will be taken directly to a page with all the other posts that have the same info.  You can also go directly to http://search.twitter.com and use the advanced search to find tweets on favorite topics.
• A “nudge” is something you do to get someone to tweet who hasn’t been tweeting for a while.

I am still learning how to make my “tweets” enticing…Angwin states that “without a point of view, my updates were pretty boring.  So, for instane, I changed ‘eating strawberries during a snowstorm” to “eating strawberries during a snowstorm, not carbon efficient but lovely”.

Any tips to add? Please feel free to comment!

I spend more and more time in the wonderful world of twitter lately, how about you?  Twitter is a unique networking site, a place where you “follow” people and they “follow” you, a great way to connect and make friends, potential customers and clients.

If you are “following” someone, you can see their messages, called “Tweets” listed on your Twitter page. The best way to start “Tweeting” on twitter is to post friendly replies to people, not just “spam” like messages promoting your service or product. Twitter is fun! Enjoy it and learn by watching how others communicate.

On Twitter, your messages are called “replies” or “direct messages”.  To “reply” to someone, you put a @ in front of their username, OR, you point your mouse next to their message, and a “reply” option will appear for you to click on.  A “reply” is seen by everyone.

If you don’t want everyone to see your response to someone, then you send them a “Direct Message”.  This is done by clicking on their username and visiting their “home” page, and then looking down the bar on the right for “message (username)”.  Click on that to send a message privately.

You can view your “replies” or your “direct messages” by clicking on the appropriate link in the sidebar.

It’s not hard at all…the only trick is that your messages can only be 140 characters long…it’s fun to think of ways to say what you want in a short “tweet”.

This is a great way to network and meet people.  I’ll be back with a few more tips later this week!

Oh! By the way, if you’re already on Twitter, follow me at http://twitter.com/happynutrition and be sure to send me a message letting me know you found me here on Work at Home Grandmothers.