(If you’re new to the Great TwiX Experiment, click here for Week 1.)

I’ve been on vacation for a couple of weeks, and these reports have lagged to the point where they’re no longer even close to weekly. I’d thought I could keep up with them easily, but life intervened, and I left my data behind at home.

So here instead we have an interim bulletin, complete with…
NEWS FLASH! Elon Musk now pays me to TwiX!

That’s right, ladies, gentlemen, and trolls: I’m getting ad-share three months sooner than expected. On the 10th of September, following 40 days of the Great Twitter Experiment and some 30 days of using my system, I received notice that I’d cleared 5 million Impressions and could sign up for free money. Of course I did; not much point to running the experiment if I hadn’t.

Not quite a week later, I got paid. Twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents.

A bit of a disappointment, in one sense; that’s no longer enough to keep me in tea and ginger snaps after taxes come out. Plus, payouts are still irregular and semi-simultaneous, and I’m at the very bottom of the list. On the other hand, I was doing this anyway, so in that sense it’s free money. From it we deduct subscription costs for two months — $16. And that’s for the entire year to date.

Which is what brought me up short: My system is great for farming impressions, but according to the fine print, I only get paid for the impressions on the posts that I write. Replies don’t count. Ergo, time to change the system.

Scheduled Posts:

A while back, I discovered that mixing text with a picture or GIF is the best way to drive traffic. The algorithm favors the combination two to one over straight text. My experiments indicate that pictures alone don’t do quite as well either, though the difference is smaller.

In order to see how they’d do, I set up pre-scheduled TwiXes on a travel day, and did a limited number of replies to my system follows in order to generate some traffic from more than just my own Followers. At present, every daytime text Post gets 20-30 Impressions; combined TwiXes can get up to 100. Ten a day means I’ll likely get another $20 somewhere around Christmas. Which isn’t bad, but it’s not exciting either.

For content, I’m stealing seasonal artwork and funny memes from LinkedBook FaceSpace. Great art does well, as do memes, but the best results are from “On This Day In Middle-Earth” stuff. Probably just my audience; you do you, but feel perfectly free to copy me.

Unscheduled Posts:

One of the accounts I Follow for fun is @TheDreadShips, a retiree from England who does long rambling chain posts on ridiculous, suicidal, or just plain funny-looking warships. He has no intention of subscribing; probably has no need of the money. He does, however, pick up about 40k Impressions per chain, and he does a couple per week: plenty to monetize.

I am not him, and I don’t plan to be. I’m a writer, and I’m here to push my fiction, not mimic someone else no matter how great his stuff is. However, this past weekend during research for a writing contest, I stumbled across an amazing story that I’d never heard before, and I just had to get it out there.

And I did.

I ended up with a twenty-TwiX chain. Each has one picture and the story behind it, and the whole put together is a tale worth telling. (If you missed it, click here: https://twitter.com/Gnerphk/status/1706648089660891445) I linked each of my sources, and I tagged Dread a couple of times to thank him for his inspiration (and because I knew he’d love the story).

I did this for fun, but for our purposes it makes an interesting study: Where my normal memes do 100-odd Impressions, each of these is closing on 500, and the top TwiX is at 11,000 and climbing. In terms of ad-share, this alone is equivalent to a month or more of my usual traffic.

A Word On Words:

Throwaway quips are great, especially if they’re witty. Thoughtful discussion, however, drives Follower count, engagement, and replies. More to the point, it actually adds value to the site, which is good for one’s personal satisfaction. Can’t hope to succeed if you burn out.

The ideal, of course, is to promote thoughtful discussion on your own home page so as to generate income. I have yet to work out precisely how that can be managed, alas. Perhaps if more of my regular readers join me on TwiX…

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