You probably already recommend things, people, and companies on Twitter. These people are benefitting from your good will and positive word of mouth. There are probably things you also would like that marketers will promote with TweetROI, and you can get paid to recommend them. This is a way you can authentically make money with Twitter. A lot of you put a lot of time into your Twitter activities and building your profiles, following, and relationships. Your followers trust you and want to hear what you recommend. If you do it honestly, you can help them and make a little bit of extra money.

Not exactly. See this blog post. We don’t really hate advertising. In fact, Brian Carter is a pay-per-click advertising guru.

With TweetROI our goal was to create a recommendation platform where marketers and influentials could meet and exchange financial capital for social capital. In other words, you have influence, and marketers want to pay you for it without buying your soul or putting words in your mouth. You control your words and your integrity.

Social media marketing is different- the companies paying for influence don’t control the message anymore. But that can make it more powerful. This is incentivized but authentic positive word of mouth marketing.

A small portion may. There are always people with extreme viewpoints. Some people believe that no one can get paid and remain honest. In our view, these people have a point, but go too far. Most of us get paid to do something, and most of us are able to do that with integrity.

We spoke to many influential twitterers privately before finishing TweetROI and were pleasantly surprised that none of them had a problem with it. We believe that ultimately it’s between you and your followers. If you have a strong positive image and robust relationships with them, and your tweets remain personal and authentic, you’ll be fine.

Be yourself. Tweet like you normally do. Give your authentic opinion, in your normal voice.

Transparency is controversial and even problematic. Brian wrote something on this (http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/the-illusion-of-transparency-in-social-media.html), and Lisa Barone did too (http://outspokenmedia.com/affiliate-marketing/disclose-affiliate-links/). We believe this is ultimately about your integrity, reputation, and the trust of your followers.

Nonetheless, we’ve built into TweetROI the ability for marketers to require disclosure via the #ROI hashtag. If you choose to tweet about a campaign where the marketer requires disclosure, the tweet will contain that hashtag. The Federal Trade Commission does not yet have clear laws to enforce on this issue, but disclosure in marketing is the standard, so TweetROI is already set up to comply.

Marketers do not see what twitterers are participating in TweetROI, and do not get reports about who has tweeted their campaigns. They may, in the course of monitoring their reputations, find your tweet about their service. They may even express gratitude to you about it, though we’d hope they’d do that privately. It’s our hope that marketers will respect twitterer’s default right to privacy and boundaries.

100% yes.

Go to the “Twitterer” tab in the navigation. You’ll see a list of campaigns you can review and choose to tweet about.

Write them like you do normally. Watch out for what we call the High School Term Paper syndrome. If you find your tweet doesn’t sound like you, you probably don’t have an authentic opinion about the topic yet. Give it some more thought.

Marketers can require approval on any campaign. The marketer should have given you a clear reason for declining your tweet. If you feel they did not, please contact us with details. If a marketer doesn’t cooperate with twitterers, we reserve the right to ban them from TweetROI.

We developed these rankings to be accurate enough for marketers to bid more or less based on your influence. We hope people don’t get too attached to the numbers- if you do twitter well, your numbers should be good enough. Not everyone is a twitter rock star. And not everyone is famous enough in real life to have a million followers. The rankings reflect the diversity of many twitterers’ influence from top to bottom.

Payments are automatically sent out on the 15th of each month via PayPal. However, you must have met your payout minimum before you can receive a payment. The mimimum varies based on different sign-up promotions that we run so check your My Account page in order to see what yours is. You must also make sure you've provided your tax and PayPal information to us. If we don't have that information, you payment will be skipped until you enter it.

Payments are for tweets that have been sent prior to the first day of the payment month. For example, if you send tweets worth $25 in the month of August and $5 in the first half of September, you should expect to receive a payment for $25 on September 15th, not $30.

1. Tweet more, but keep it real.
2. Join our affiliate program!

If you want to reach the followers of influential Twitterers, this is a very efficient method.

There used to be just one way to reach people on Twitter. Build a Twitter profile, find followers, engage with them, repeat. Depending on your resources, it can take at least several months and hundreds of person-hours to reach the point where your follower base is sizable and warm enough to get you the results you want.

We don’t believe TweetROI replaces your Twitter profile- in fact it can work in harmony with it, and could be used as a way to get you more followers- TweetROI is a complimentary marketing strategy, but can be a highly efficient alternative as well.

Twitter is not a classified ad section. It’s not a swap meet. It’s a place where people meet, talk, make friends, and help one another. TweetROI leverages the influence of Twitterers who have gained influence by being themselves, using their expertise and personality and opinions to gain the trust of their followers. Any marketing solution that taps into Twitterer influence must respect the authenticity and personality of the Twitterers. That’s why TweetROI wants Twitterers to write tweets in their own words. Many Twitterers are averse to the type of marketing you might normally use.

Don’t think of TweetROI as an advertising network, but as a way to reach thousands of positive word of mouth spokespeople for your brand, service, product, non-profit, political campaign, and so on. You’re giving people a chance to say something positive about you. Let them say that in their own words.

You do retain some control: if you want to approve all tweets before they go out, you may do that. We ask only that you write your expectations clearly in the “info for Twitterers” section of new campaign creation. That way, Twitterers won’t be surprised if you decline their tweet. You might want to tell them that some portion of your suggested tweet text shouldn’t change (e.g. “please mention the product name”), or you might want to give them a general suggestion (e.g. “say anything positive about our new product”) so that they can choose their own message.

If you decline a tweet, you will be asked to give a reason to the Twitterer. Remember that you should be cooperating with these hired brand messengers- your success depends on their good will. Cooperation is the name of the game.

We built TweetROI to give you the ability to leverage Twitterer influence, but not as a matchmaking service to can find specific Twitterers. We did this to protect the privacy of Twitterers.

Believe it or not, many people in social media are leery of becoming hucksters shilling for companies. Many that are influential gained and retain the respect of their followers by being independent and authentic. That means your association with them should be loose.

As in the previous question, we want to protect the privacy of Twitterers who participate. We do not provide reports that give the identity of your spokespeople. We would ask that you appreciate the power TweetROI gives you to get your message out, and respect the Twitterers’ privacy and anonymity.

Obviously, there are ways for you to try to find out which Twitterers have tweeted your campaigns. We ask you respect them and our system by not contacting them. If you feel you need to contact them, please do so privately, not publicly. If we find you are trying to subvert our system or make Twitterers uncomfortable, or cause them to lose followers, we reserve the right to ban you from TweetROI.

There are four separate rankings, all scored on a 1-10 scale relative to other Twitterers.

• UserRank is overall and inclusive. It includes all the factors the other three focus on.
• ConversationRank is highest for Twitterers who get the most @replies from other users.
• TalkRank is highest for Twitterers who tweet the most.
• ViralRank is highest for Twitterers whose tweets are retweeted the most.

Our system starts with the Twitterers who rank the highest (including people like Ashton Kutcher, Obama, etc.), and rank any Twitterer in our system relative to the top person. That means it takes as many retweets at Ashton gets (or whoever’s getting the most) to be a 10.

The exact equations and algorithms we use to determine rankings may change as time goes on to ensure accuracy and quality to get the best results for all parties.

• If you’re not sure, use UserRank.
• If you want more reach, use ViralRank. Retweets of the tweets you pay for don’t cost you any extra money.
• If you want conversations to happen about your brand, use ConversationRank.
• If you want to be talked about by talkative tweeps, use TalkRank.

First choose the rank you want to focus on.

Then, for each rank level, decide your bid, max tweets, and duration between tweets. How much do you want to pay a 10 ranked Twitterer to tweet your campaign? How many of these tweets do you want? How frequently or infrequently do you want them to tweet? For example, if you want three tweets from rank 10 Twitterers, but you want them to happen on different days, enter 3 tweets max, 24 hours apart.

Repeat that process for each rank level.

To start with, they’re just a guess.

But as time goes on, and our system gathers data, we will know how much a tweet by a ViralRank 10 Twitterer is worth. We’ll find this based on what marketers have bid and what Twitterers accept. Over time, the marketplace will determine the value of a tweet.

After you start a campaign, if you find you aren’t getting tweets from certain rankings, you might need to increase your bid for those rankings.

When you create a campaign, you can name a parameter and create a value for it that is appended to your destination URL. You can then configure your analytics package to tell you the results you’ve received from your TweetROI campaigns.

There are a number of reasons why your campaign might not get tweeted.

1. First, is this something a lot of people would want to tweet? People on twitter who have any influence are going to avoid tweeting things that look weird. If it's too controversial, or sounds spammy, no one who wants to keep their following will tweet it. Make some improvements there, and you'll have a better chance.

2. Are you bidding enough? Early on with TweetROI we had a marketer bid only $0.50 per tweet- that means the Twitterer will only get about $0.13. I'm pretty sure tweets are worth more than that. Some people think about tweets in pay per click terms, but a good tweet could get 10-100 clicks. In the case above, you'd come out at 1.3 to 0.13 cents per click. That's way too low... If your tweet averages 25 clicks (a safe estimate), then a $2.50 tweet comes out to $0.10 cost per click, which is quite affordable. Please read this blog post about tweet values: http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/value-tweet-worth.html. I'd suggest you increase the bids and use advanced rank bidding to reward the more powerful twitterers with greater pay.

The key to both of the above is to think about TweetROI as a marketplace. Your suggested tweets have to work for you, for Twitterers, and for their followers. The bid has to work for you and the Twitterers. It's a collaboration, so be a team player and think about all the parties involved.

Our network of Twitterers is growing. I suggest you make the above changes and expect that as we grow, more people will see your campaign and tweet it.

Yes, we make campaigns invisible (in the twitterer interface) to the person that created them because we wanted to prevent people from using TweetROI for other creative purposes. We didn't have anything in mind for this, but some people on the internet are very creative ;-)

There's no approval process. Twitterers who qualify for the minimum ranks you've set can see it as soon as you make the campaign active.

We highly recommend reviewing your tweets just to make sure nothing goes out you don't want. In the first week of TweetROI we found a twitterer tweeting expletives about a campaign that wasn't being reviewed. The marketer changed the setting to review tweets, and we warned the twitterer we might ban them if they didn't behave.

However, with our latest release, you now have the ability to keep twitterers from customizing the tweet text. We suggest you pick one or the other.

We highly suggest you use Advanced Rank Bidding. We think it's so important we've just made it the default way to create campaigns.