The idea of monetizing activity streams through in-stream advertisements is starting to gain greater acceptance, just as monetizing other aspects of your online social profiles starting to become a thing. At the recent Techcrunch50 event, online social startup uDorse demonstrated their ability to take photographs that appear on social networking profiles and connect them with brand advertisers for mini-endorsement deals.

After the initial backlash against in-stream Twitter ads, it’s becoming more accepted as a fact of life that some Twitter users (like myself) accept placements from companies like Magpie, IZEA and Twittads.

Mark Evans is reporting that more such ad networks are coming down the pike as well, including one from Assetize. Ad.ly is launching an ad network designed to cater to celebrities, and Glam Media is also launching an ad network named Tinker.

This even further pushes the concept of the activity stream towards notion of a Matrix-style real-time backchannel rather than a forum for conversation or discussion, a notion I’m completely at home with.

Because Twitter has more or less decided that they’re in the business of doing something other than advertising on their creation, they’ve left the door completely open to third party monetization through sponsorship and advertising.  This is good, because it allows for a competitive landscape of democratized and boutique monetization solutions – you’re not locked into the idea of advertising on your Twitterstream, but should you choose to do so, you’ve got a number of options on how to make that happen, and you’re allowed with all existing networks to decide what sorts of advertisements appear in your name.

What Works Best for the You, the Publisher?

We’ve talked about the best practices for activity stream advertisements, and what achieves the best results for advertisers many times.  Today, I’d like to take a look at what’s going to get you the best bang for your name on Twitter as a publisher.

Before we get too far into this mess, I’d like to apologize for my title.  As with most types of ad sales, you probably aren’t going to get rich off of in-stream ads unless you have a full-time sales team working for you alone and millions of viewers.

You can, though, reasonably expect to pay one of your monthly bills, like your water bill, phone bill, or electric bill with your Twitter revenues.

To give you an idea of where my numbers and estimates come from, I’ll give you a snapshot of what I’m working with personally.

I have right around 3850 followers, and I update my Twitter feed somewhere between 15 and 35 times a day (rather on the high end of things). This generally means that at any given point, my twitterstream is ready for a sponsored tweet (in general, most networks require there be at least five regular tweets between sponsored tweets, but typically don’t issue sponsored tweets at that frequency).

On average, every month, I cash out between the two primary ad networks I utilize (Magpie and TwittAds) right around $130.00 or so. It’s obviously not a way to make a full-time living, particularly if you have less followers than I do (as most people on Twitter do).

Additionally, using Twitter to make money isn’t my primary goal.  On the other hand, having my cable and internet bill paid for every month for simply doing what it is I already do on Twitter is a nice side-bonus for using the service.

It does take some configuration and tweaking to get to this point – and I’ll share my secrets here so you don’t have to go through the trial and error I did to get it to this point.

Tweaking Your Twitter Ad Network Settings

As I said, the primary two ad networks I use are the incumbents: Magpie and TwittAds.  As of present, I’ve received no opportunities on IZEA’s network, and as much as I want to be in their corner, I haven’t seen anything impressive from them pre or post launch. Similarly, the other companies I mentioned in the introduction (Assetize, Glam and Ad.ly) are very much newcomers to this business, and though I haven’t play-tested them I don’t believe they’d be mature enough at this point to provide true value to a Twitterer looking to monetize their stream.

TwittAds: General Usage

TwittAds is the service that requires both the least up-front customization and the most case-by-case basis maintenance.  TwittAds has a much lower throughput in terms of their advertisers, and plenty of inventory to fill, so it’s tricky getting in on the good campaigns.

In general, the types of ads on Twittads, while they are fewer and further between, are of higher quality than what typically comes across on Magpie. Past sponsors I’ve had include Jeep, Landrover, KMart and HotForWords.

TwittAds is different from other networks that I’ve seen in that they not only put tweets in your stream, but rent out your Twitter page background, so there’s more of a commitment to the sponsor by the part of you, the publisher, which requires you to be a bit choosy.  I, as a general rule, only take about a third of the campaigns I’m offered, as a result.

I also find that a lot of the campaigns come in at about 10 PM or even later, so it’s not a bad idea to have an alert go to your mobile phone when an email comes in from them so you can catch the campaign before it’s all taken.

Setting Up Magpie: Fire and Forget

Once you’ve gone through the initial set-up wizard on Magpie, you’re presented with a sea of options, most of which are completely useless and in my mind ultimately detrimental to advertising on Twitter.

Of course, I’m speaking of the Cost-per-action style affiliate tweets that Magpie has gotten in hot water for in the past. Cost-per-action ads are bad for you on Twitter for a number of reasons:

• Bloggers and social media users hate them, and you’ll likely get called out for running them.
• They’re usually of a pretty low quality (think envelope stuffing, ebooks and John Reese type stuff).
• Most importantly: they almost never make you any money.

I’m not sure if it’s the tracking system, the quality of the ads or the type of people who follow me, but I ran these CPA style ads in my Twitterstream for sometime, and never made a dime from them. Ultimately, this was the deciding factor in me removing them.

Fortunately, Magpie makes it easy for you to set up your account and forget about future configuration if you know where to look.

Using the configurations from the illustrations above, you’ll be given every sponsored tweet you match with (based upon keywords desired by the campaign and keywords within your own Tweet stream) that comes along that pay either per tweet view or by per click on the tweet.  Similarly, it will block all sponsored tweets that pay on actions performed by the readers, like signing up, paying for the service or per-lead.

Using this configuration will maximize your revenue potential on Twitter, and in general not annoy your followers.