The idea is simple. If you’re a would-be advertiser, you just take a cruise on over to the Ad.ly site, where you’ll find a list of popular “Twitter Publishers”. Right now, the top of that list is Kim Kardashian, with about 2.5 million followers. In second place is Dr. Drew, coming in at about 1.5 million. Following them are hundreds of other folks, of varying levels of fame and/or online notoriety, each helpfully annotated with the number of followers they have. Once you find the right person to tweet your ad, you say how much you’re willing to pay. Then Ad.ly gets in touch with them and if they agree to the price, they’ll send out your tweet for you.

And how much will all this cost you? Ad.ly is a bit coy about exactly how much different people make for their one-off Twitter ads, but it’s usually in the range of 4 or 5 figures for the more high profile publishers. One clever thing that Ad.ly does, is limit the amount of paid tweets to one per publisher, per day. This prevents things from turning into a big spam-fest, which ultimately protects the value of their celebrity publishers.

So if you’ve got a whole lot of followers for your Twitter account, can you get in on the action? Yes you can. You don’t have to be a Kardashian to start making some money from Ad.ly. All you need is the ability to make 140 characters interesting enough that you attract a few tens of thousands of followers. Once you’ve done that, you could start raking it in.

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