Sponsored Tweets vs Paid Links [LinkBee - Earn to Shorten and Share Links]

This post compares two famous services viz. LinkBee and SposoredTweets. Both of these services will help you to monetize your tweets, but in entirely different ways. According to their features, I found LinkBee way better than SponsoredTweets.

Along with its already famous (pay-to-blog) services SocialSpark and PayPerPost, Izea recently introduced SposoredTweets.com
As the domain-name says, it pays you to simply tweet. But these tweets are not your original opinion, rather they are given by some advertisers. To maintain at least some ethics in their system, the members are required to have a 100% disclosure in all their sponsored tweets. See this small video, how the system works:

Have a look on how frequently paid/sponsored tweets are being added (remember that although these tweets are disclosed by #ad, but there are several other disclosed/undisclosed paid tweets too): sponsored tweets @Twitter

BUT, there's a small catch in their service:
If your tweet does not reach a $1.50 CPC, it will be re-tweeted 48 hours later. You will be paid for this tweet as soon as it reaches a $1.50 CPC, or 2 hours after it is tweeted 3 times. You will still be paid the initial offer amount for all offers, but with this option enabled, you will be much more attractive to advertisers.
These repeated tweets (that too paid), may slowly bring down your authority and no. of followers.

So here's a better alternative to Sponsered Tweets: LinkBee [registration required]

Get paid to shorten and share links

What is LinkBee?
Similar to tinyurl, bit.ly, ow.ly and is.gd etc. this service will shorten any url. For ex:
http://linkbee.com/EEH4N will display http://bloggerstop.net
[but observe that the blog BloggerStop will be displayed within a frame provided by LinkBee with some ads at the top]

What's new in LinkBee?
Now here's the interesting part of LinkBee shortening service; in LinkBee you can shorten a url in 3 ways:

1. A standard short URL linking service with no advertisements, but this WILL NOT allow you to earn any revenues (just like other above listed services).

2. Other two options will allow you to earn revenue with your links;
(i) Interstitial Ads: An interstitial acts as a brief commercial between the transition of your link and will earn you top dollar.
(ii) Top Frame Banner Ads: The top frame banner is less intrusive and will display a banner at the top of the destinations page, earning you less then the interstitial.

How to use LinkBee?
While tweeting (your regular tweets) shorten all the links using the LinkBee service (select option 2 and 3), when someone clicks on the link, you will get paid (around $0.5/1000 impressions).
Moreover you can use this service in other sites like Facebook, Orkut, Stumbleupon etc. including your own blog.

Here are the Payout Rates.

Advantages of using LinkBee over SponsoredTweets:
1. All your tweets remain yours (so definitely it's the best ethical way of monetizing your tweets)
2. You do not have to wait for an advertiser to contact you with a sponsered tweet offer; Tweet as much as you can, with embedded informative (and sponsored) linkbee-links.
3. The tweets will be more interesting and therefore more chances of being clicked.
4. Your authority (or no. of followers) will not decrease, rather depending on the quality of your tweets, you can easily get more followers.
5. Other than using this service in Twitter, you can shorten other permanent links in your blog, which when clicked by readers, you will get paid.
6. You can use LinkBee to upload photos and share them in the same way.
7. You can track how well your links are doing by observing the statistics provided by them.

Blog Admin : Divya Sai

ProBlogger - Inspiring Others Realize Their Dreams!

12 comments

Write comments

Reza Winandar

November 16, 2009 4:53 AM delete

But still it is not profitable for me, because I just have a few followers :)

Sai @BloggerStop

November 16, 2009 6:48 AM delete

Hey Reza,
Try LinkBee and put a little hardwork into this, soon both your followers and revenue will increase ;)

Soufiane

November 16, 2009 2:50 PM delete

Very interesting Divya, thanks I'll try it :))
Are you using this on your twitter ???

November 16, 2009 2:56 PM delete

I see your not yet using blogger "Avatars" :-/

November 17, 2009 9:23 AM delete

@Soufiane
Yeah I have already started using it in Twitter, that is why I recommended it to others.
Avatars in comments will make my pages heavy :P, so presently not interested in them :|

November 17, 2009 11:33 AM delete

Ok thanks, I'll try it too :D

For Avatars, it have been 1 month they are not showing well ....

What about publishing comments on Twitter ???
I do publish some of my comments, my answers....

Durkin

December 02, 2009 8:21 AM delete

I had a look into a few of these but you get very little for each click. Its going to take me forever to see if they actually pay out!

Its a good concept, but I also found the banners a little untidy when linking to websites that I have written. It would be great to link to sites you don't write because it doesn't look like its you that has added the banner!

December 02, 2009 9:09 AM delete

Yeah that's what I exactly do. All my own posts are fed to twitter through twitterfeed.com, and for the rest of the sites that I suggest to my followers I use linkbee. But ofcourse that clicks/link are too small, but if Google/bing are ready to include twitter results in their results and if one continues to get more and more followers then I think one can expect some more clicks gradually.

Online Game Developers

February 22, 2010 3:58 AM delete

I was not that much into the socila networking sites till last year, so was not having a good idea of how it works. Thanks for your article, it will help me a lot ;)

Ani.