There are a few different methods to make money on Twitter and this is one of the methods I highly deprecate. This post is written mostly as a warning.
When you retweet someone on Twitter you basically republish their message with the letters RT in front of it. By doing so you show others that this is a message you highly recommend. Another reason to why RT have become so popular is that you can get noticed by a user without having to persuade him or her into following you from the beginning.
People use this to send malware
Retweeting have become very common and recently I saw a warning about people publishing fake RT from famous users with a false link to malware.
Malware aka scumware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner’s informed consent.
By doing so you may think you are visiting a link from someone famous as Matt Cuts or Chris Brogan when it actually is from someone who are trying to hurt you or steal something from your computer.
How you can make money with Retweet
Now we know that people can use this to send malware, but how do we make money on it? It’s simple. Just signup for an affiliate network that pays you for every visitor who click on your link.
Then you hide your affiliate links and start sending fake retweets mentioning peoples usernames and persuade them into clicking on your newly created affiliate link. If you are good at programming you can actually create a software which does this automatically.
By doing this your account will be removed after a while, but then you can simply create a new one and be up and running within minutes.
Please avoid this method
As I mentioned above this is a popular method to send malware and because of this I decided to write this post as a warning and as usually I added my regular point of view about how to make money with it.
I repeat, do not try this even though it sounds compelling.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
For really desperate online scrappers, this method is really compelling Stefan. I’ve been a victim of malware links on twitter RT once, and I swear it was a bad experience. I’m being more careful at clicking RT links right now
I’m sorry to hear that Liane. I hope your computer didn’t crash or they managed to steal anything from you. Hopefully the word will spread and more people will get aware of the problem.
I keep getting such Tweets asking me to join affiliate programs, I hope none of them is coming from u
No, I’m not to keen about those messages myself. I’m currently under heavy spam about some Mafia game. I truly hate it.
Now that shows how imaginative spammers/scrapers can be!
I do not click affiliate links etc. much on Twitter. It is a good idea to use a service like longurl.com that can tell where a short URL points to and keep a good anti virus and firewall on!
Retweeting anonymous links can realy be more painful i closed my one twitter account due to heavy spam on it.