Lately Twitter has just been about everywhere. It seems like once the celebrities grabbed notice, it just went widespread through television and all media outlets. However, Twitter still isn’t making any money. Look back in time and you will see the same scenerio with MySpace and Facebook. These mega huge community web sites were created and used by millions, but still weren’t generating any money. On the flip side, when you have such a massive amount of users on a service, there are a few who are bound to figure out how to start making money.

Today I came across an interesting post on John Chow’s blog, where he goes into some detail on one of his latest affiliate promotions. First John posted a “tweet” on Twitter about the “Ultimate Footer Ad” that he is using. After his first two tweets about the product, John generated over $306 in product sales within the first 24 hours.

Keep in mind, John has over 13,000 followers, but the concept is that he generated all of those sales JUST by using twitter. John later went on to compare his sales numbers vs. blog post, and a follow mailing to his newsletter. The newsletter mailing ended up making the most money, but the Twitter post only took a few seconds.

Personally, I’ve only used Twitter for networking and keeping my followers updated with my blog. The search.twitter.com feature on the site is exploding in use as of lately. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some type of ad system or monetization from Twitter in the future. This is also an excellent resource for seeing what others are promoting, or saying about other affiliate products.

There is so much potential for making money with Twitter, but it’s still a young service and many are very protective of how others are using the service. A lot of sites (including mine) have run contests and promotions, where they are ask Twitter users to retweet a short sentence and a link your site, in exchange for being entered into a contest. This isn’t a big generator for money, but will build your followers and branding on Twitter.

It’s all about how you come off to your Twitter followers. It’s easy for someone to click “follow”, and see what you have to say. But if you are continually linking out, or trying to sell your users, they can just as easily (and more anxiously), click that “unfollow” button.

What methods have you seen, or used, for generating revenue on Twitter? The best method for long term success is to focus on building a loyal following of “followers” and keep them updated with quality tweets and what you are currently working on. You have a much better chance on having them value your opinion and clicking on your links, if you don’t continually spam or try to sell them.