Here’s the deal: Twitter has posted a bunch of new job openings, four of which focus on monetization. Twitter is almost four years old, is well established in the popular consciousness, has a few zillion users, and is now thinking about monetization.

To be fair to Twitter, I’m sure they’ve been thinking about monetization for a while, but haven’t really done anything about it. In fact, lots of people have wondered if Twitter can be monetized. Nobody is going to pay to post 140 character tweets. They could toss ads on your Twitter home page — maybe a banner at the top and a smaller block in the sidebar — but whether that could pay for their expensive infrastructure is unclear. Plenty of people use adblockers and others read tweets in other ways thanks to the Twitter API.

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Chitika has been on the scene for over five years now, but I still find that a lot of webmasters have never heard of them. So, here’s an introduction. Chitika is an advertising company. They place ads on your site using a snippet of Javascript just like Google does with AdSense. Unlike AdSense and its numerous clones, the ads here are for specific products and are not just blocks of text.

Chitika has three very different ad offerings. The one I’ve had the most success with is Chitika|Premium. This ad unit it similar to AdSense in that it is a target rectangle of ads on your page. It is unlike AdSense in that it is targeted based on the search engine queries that lead people to that page. Now, this means a couple of things. First, it means that the ads only show up when someone gets to a page directly from a search engine. You can supply something to put there at other times or it can disappear or be filled with untargeted ads. AdSense is a nice backup. Second, it means the offers are targeted to what your visitors are looking for at that moment. This is good in terms of click-through, so it is good for your bottom line.

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This post sponsored by PayPerPost.

So, this wasn’t really planned to be the first post in the Siteonomics section of the site, although there is a nice irony to be it being so. Siteonomics is my little word for monetizing your site, which is to say, making some scratch from all your hard work. There are many different things people do to monetize their sites, and I’ll cover plenty of them over the coming months. That said, there is one thing you absolutely must not do. If you do it, you will kill your site and any chance to make any money at all. That thing is selling out.

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