Today I came across a blog post about Twittad, a way to make money off your twitter profile. The jist of the service seems to be that you sell the background of your profile to an advertiser.

I’m pretty interested in this idea for a few reasons (and no, not interested because I think it’s a good idea).

From the perspective of an advertiser:
As a frequent twitterer, I can’t say that I visit people’s profile pages very often at all. Instead, I use twhirl on my laptop, and twitterific and twinkle on my iPhone. So I’m curious about how much traffic a profile page is likely to garner. How many eyeballs would an ad really get?

Branding the background of the page means that an advertiser can add a graphic, but no links. This means a profile viewer can’t simply click an ad to visit your site, he must type the URL in directly. I can only assume that this would result in fewer visitors than a standard clickable ad would elsewhere.

However, we have no way of knowing. Currently there are no metrics available on twitter profiles views, and without clickable links, click-throughs obviously can’t be tracked. How does an advertiser know if his ad was effective? There doesn’t appear to be any way to calculate the ROI or effectiveness.

Is the investment worth it for an advertiser? It’s hard to say. Certainly it’s not a large investment (some of the going rates are $5), but many of the twits willing to accept advertising aren’t exactly highly followed.

From the perspective of a twit:
I will admit, I haven’t done anything to modify the default display of either of my twitter feeds. Both @afhill and @afhill262 are basically twitter-branded. However, if I were to change the overall feel of the profile pages, I would want them to promote my personal brand, not that of an advertiser. Obviously it would depend on the objective of your twitter account.
I often recall a comment made by Marsha Collier at iCitizen last May. She said that she doesn’t have adWords on her site because she views her personal brand integrity as more important than the income she could make off advertising.

I’ve already questioned how often a profile page is viewed anyway, so I don’t want to make too much of a case for not diluting the brand by placing an ad on this page. At the same time, is it worth putting an ad on your profile for a couple lousy bucks? Particularly in light of the fact that you don’t actually get paid until you have $20 in your account?

I know that there’s been an unofficial race to figure out how to many money off twitter. I’m just not sure this is it. And without metrics or tracking associated with the program, we’re not likely to find out.

Edit: After a response by the CEO of TwittAd, I started thinking about how some level of measurement could be achieved. If TwittAd serves up the background ads, they could use their own metrics packages to determine how often the ads are served up. That could potentially even allow them to shift their offerings from time- to impression-based. As well, educating advertisers on using a custom URL in the ads could help to identify which visitors were coming as a result of viewing twittAds. It’s an inexact science to be sure, but there may be ways to come up with some means to measure the impact of the investment..

I like to hang out in the LinkedIn Q&A section, and recently someone asked about the relationship between RSS and Feedburner. This is a slightly lengthened version of my response:

RSS refers to the format (more or less standard). Many, many services out there offer an RSS feed. That way you can syndicate your content: people can get it when they want it, rather than having to come to your site to see if there is anything new.

There are two implications to this:
1) metrics: you can’t measure page hits. What’s your traffic like?
2) maintenance. What happens when you change your URL, do you lose your subscribers?

Feedburner helps with both of these issues (and more!) You create a feedburner URL (http://feeds.feedburner.com/afhill) and then can access your metrics via the feedburner site. You can see how many subscribers you have as well as how often they’re acting on the posts they’re reading. You can get some more information about their platform and how they’re accessing your information.

Using feedburner also allows you to dress up your feed a bit more. You can incorporate your del.icio.us bookmarks into the feed that is pushed out, without having them actually show up on your blog, or add in your flickr photos. You can choose to post only content excerpts, and select which means of social sharing you want to enable directly from the feed. Feedburner offers options you likely never even considered! All these options are organized into 5 sections on the feedburner site: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshootize. This may seem a bit daunting, but all the features are easily enabled and disabled, so it’s easy to experiment and optimize for your own needs.
I personally use several Wordpress plugins related to analytics (Feedburner Feedsmith, Google Analytics, Wordpress Reports and the Most Active Widget) and Wordpress reports gives me the option to monitor my RSS circulation right from within my Wordpress dashboard. Handy!