If you haven’t been living on Mars then you must have heard of Twitter by now. With all the media attention this social networking site has generated, culminating with the big showdown between Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and CNN (@cnnbrk), a lot of people curious about Twitter tried it out to see what all this was about.

Twitter is a social networking site unlike the other players in this field like Facebook and Myspace. On Twitter, you can post messages which are called tweets of up to 140 characters long. This in effect makes Twitter a microblogging site. It’s a great way of telling your friends and contacts what you are doing in real time. You could post “I’m eating breakfast now. Bacon and eggs” and your contacts can read about this. They will be able to comment on this as well. Accesing your Twitter account is very convenient since you can use your computer or your mobile phone. Since its creation in 2006, it has now gained an estimate of 5 milion users.

What’s great about Twitter is that the demographics of its users vary. We have housewives using the service and posting Tweets on what they are doing. Businessmen keep their contacts updated using Tweets as well, no need to email or inform them one by one. Just send out a tweet and everyone will know. Famous artists who use Twitter constantly update their fans using the service as well.

Since a lot of people are using Twitter nowadays, we could make money out of this service if we just know how. Before you can make money though make sure to build up a huge contact list. It would be great if you had 1 million followers like Ashton Kutcher has but that would be highly improbable for ordinary people. If you could increase your contact list to a couple of hundred then it would surely help in your quest to make money from Twitter. If you have a large number of followers then here are some ways to make money from Twitter

Advertise your Site

One good way to promote your online site is through Twitter. Whenever you twit, try to include the URL of your site for your followers to see. There is a very good chance that they will click on the link resulting in traffic to your site.

Advertise your Service

If you are a computer technician living in San Diego then you could use Twitter to advertise your service. For this to work it would be best if all your followers are living in the San Diego area. You could twit about what you are doing and also include your services. Your followers who would need your services would surely contact you.

Product Endorsement

If you have lots of followers certain companies might want to hire your services to advertise their products on your tweets. All you do is do your regular tweets and insert the product that you would be endorsing.

Information Service

If you are in charge of marketing a particular brand or product, Twittter is one great way to inform your followers of the latest news about it. Your mall is having a 1 day sale? Just tweet it so that your followers will be able to take advantage of the opportunity.

These are just some of the ways to make money out of Twitter. Just keep in mind that to be able to make money on Twitter you must build up your follower list so that when its time for you to advertise, a lot of people will be able to read your tweets.