How To Get Paid with Magpie

Magpie is one of the many services out there that will pay you to tweet for them. I’ve been using it for a while now and definitely can’t complain. You probably won’t make enough to pay your mortgage, but a little gas money just for doing what you already do is worth it. In this post, we’ll take a look at the simplest way to set up Magpie. We don’t want to get bogged down in all the bells and whistles, we just want a little money on the side without doing much work.

Warning

Before we actually set this thing up, be aware that Magpie is going to use your Twitter account to tweet about stuff they feel is relevant to you and what you already talk about. By law, these tweets have to be disclosed as paid ads. Your followers will know exactly what you’re doing. If you are not confident in the fact that you should make money for your social media activity, you can stop reading here. There is no way to do this on the down low.

Getting Started

The first step is actually signing up for Magpie. They do offer an affiliate program, so if you know someone that already uses magpie, you should ask them for their referral link. Otherwise, just hit the sign up page and put in your Twitter username. Magpie will give you an estimate as to how much bling you could earn per month. Go ahead and fill in your info to create your account.

Activating Autopilot

There are a few key settings in the Dashboard that helped me actually start earning money without doing a lot of work.

• Turn off Pre-approval. I thought I wanted to approve every single tweet manually, but that was too time-consuming and slow.
• Block all per-lead and per-sale magpie tweets. These didn’t make me any cash and seem to be the spammiest looking ads.
• Make sure per view and per-click tweets are NOT blocked. These are your money-makers.
• I also chose the #spnsr disclosure to show up after the tweet. Not sure if it’s had any real effect, but I think it looks better than #ad.

Tweet/Ad Ratio

The final thing that you need to decide is just how many ads you want in your stream. Magpie lets you pick a minimum number of real tweets it should see before inserting an ad. If you’re very active, you may need to choose a higher number here. How do you figure out what to put here, though? This was another key setting that I had to tweak before seeing any results. My solution was to find out exactly how much I tweeted on average per-day and then figure out how my ads I wanted in my stream each day. Don’t worry, this requires minimal math skills. I just went to TweetStats.com, plugged in my Twitter username.

According to TweetStats, my TPD (tweets per day) is about 22.9. If I only want to see about 2 ads in my stream each day, I would set my Tweet/Ad ratio to 10 tweets / 1 ad. This doesn’t guarantee that there will be a relevant ad available every 10 tweets. If you’re more/less active, adjust accordingly based on how many ads you want your followers to see per day. Unfortunately, You can only choose 5,10,15,20,30…200 here. I would actually prefer something between 5 and 10.

Watch the Cash Roll In

Well, maybe. Your success with Magpie will definitely vary based on what you tweet about and how often you tweet. Your follower count is another obvious factor that will make the difference. If you’re not a serious Twitter user, don’t expect to make serious money via Magpie. It’s just that simple.

Has Magpie worked or not worked for you? Tell us about it!

About the Author
Rahsheen has been a certified geek since before it was the thing to do. He started programming and tinkering in the 4th grade. Now, Rahsheen mostly writes on various sites about technology trends in social media and mobile. . He is also a musician, singer, rapper, writer, and producer. @rahsheen - +Rahsheen Porter - coachrah.com
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