I’ve heard a lot of people over the last several months (maybe even the last 2 years) talking about how much of a waste of time Twitter is and how there is nothing productive that can be gained from it.  I’m here to tell you that Twitter is an incredibly powerful tool if you know how to use it, and you use it well.

Let’s just talk about that fact that last night from one “tweet” I received over 600 clicks to a test offer.  All in about 5 minutes. Granted, I’ll give you that the conversion rate was low (around 1%), but I haven’t put a lot of work into this promotion and really just wanted to see what kind of response I could get.

For the time put into it, all of about 60 seconds, I’d consider this a pretty good example of what Twitter can do for you.

Then I stumble across Sponsored Tweets and see how they’re giving everybody a chance to make some money with their Twitter accounts, and another company called Ad.ly that is doing basically the same thing.

Here’s how it works, you sign up with either (or both) of the companies mentioned above.  You set your price for your tweets and then advertisers find you and pay you to tweet about their product and/or service.

Of course, the first major concern that you’re obviously going to have is tweet spam.  If you join these companies, are you going to look like just another goofwad that had joined Twitter to spam a bunch of links and annoy people.  I can tell you this, if that’s how you’re going to choose to use these services, then you will look like a spammer.  And you’ll also get your accounts with them banned pretty quickly.

Both companies require you to be very open and honest about the fact that what you’re tweeting is an ad.  Choose not to do that, and you won’t be making money for very long.

Choose the right path, create and engage in conversations and provide value to the people following you, and you’ll start to see some results.

Now, let’s just be frank and honest about how much money you’re likely to make using either of these services.  For the vast majority of us, it’s probably not going to be enough to pay your mortgage. And if you go into it thinking that it will, you’re just fooling yourself.  Just like another service I’ve been recommending lately that lets you share videos and get paid for it (check out VideoForward to find out more), Sponsored Tweets and Ad.ly are really just going to provide you with some supplemental income at best.

That is, unless you become a power Twitter user overnight and get about a million people to follow you. I’m not trying to convince you to go out and rake in a bunch of new followers or use some spammy software that “guarantees thousands of new followers every day.” What I am encouraging you to do is to take advantage of something that you are already doing and make a little money on the side from it.

Try out both of these services, it can’t hurt.  Then let me know what you think.