Making Money with your twitter clone site: Part 1

Making Money with your twitter clone site

In part 1 in the 2 part series of “Making Money” with your twitter clone site, I am going to show you a few basic tips to monetize your twitter clone site. While running a Twitter clone website has secondary effect of bringing more web traffic and create better user retention on your website, the primary focus on this article is monetizing your twitter clone site.

1) Web-based Ads
Existing ReVou site owners can integrate banner ads on their ReVou website similar to what Gozub.com, one of the ReVou application user has done on their website:

Web-based ads can in any form of ad creatives ranging from Google Adsense, Banner Ads, Flash Ads. As mentioned in our post on “Not another Twitter clone site? “, we highlight on the various types of twitter sites you can create. Typically sites that are based on geographical or pertaining to a specific industry will be able to command higher advertising fees since the audiences are considered as targeted traffic.
One can also implement Google Adsense which will display relevant Google ads based on the website content which is the message discussion on your micro-blogging site that is relating to a particular product or service; the click-thru rate will be much higher since the Google ad matches the subject of discussion by your users.

There are 2 sections in your ReVou site where you can implement your own banners ads HTML codes:
- Header/Footer section: Edit the index.tpl file in the templates folder
- Right Menu Section (refer to Gozub.com above): Edit the right.tpl file in the templates folder

2) SMS credits purchase
The 2nd way you can monetize is when your users purchase SMS credits in order to send/receive messages. In the ReVou admin panel, the site administrator can create SMS plans by defining the cost per X number of SMS credits for users to purchase. The site operator running the ReVou micro-blogging site will be able to earn revenues per sms credits sent/receive. . Of course no one would pay to receive random messages via SMS therefore this is particularly an effective business model for sites that are running Twitter clone based on a specific industry where users will need to pay a “premium” which is the SMS credits for receiving messages that are deem as valuable such as an affiliate marketing company offering insider news using the Twitter micro-blogging concept. Your users on the other hand can choose to disable SMS notices or restrict the number of SMS they can receive to prevent unnecessary charges due to SMS messages.
Other potential ways of monetizing your own Twitter site

The potential of monetizing your own Twitter site is virtually limitless based on the type of twitter site you are running, for example you can include a permission based marketing to include text ads that will be attached at every message sent by a user or even charging access for member accounts (which of course would not work for a “Generic” twitter clone site but would definitely be feasible for industry-centric twitter site as users would have no qualms about paying for valuable news and updates such as in the property market scenario we gave).

We would be glad to provide online advice/consultation on monetization if you intend run your own Twitter clone website using our ReVou application.
In the second part we will cover on the exciting plugins we will be offering that is focuses on monetizing your own Twitter site using ReVou.   Sources  http://blog.revou.com/2008/06/25/making-money-with-your-twitter-clone-site-part-1/

Source: http://billgateguide.blogspot.com/2010/08/making-money-with-your-twitter-clone.html