A COMMON reason given by those who have yet to try Twitter: “I have nothing to say.”

The truth is, you don’t have to post a message to get the most out of Twitter.

At its best, the social medium is a perpetual, personalized news service about topics of your choosing — whether health care reform, tech news or the latest episode of “Gossip Girl” — filtered and served to you by people who care a lot about what you care a lot about.

Even the most prolific users say Twitter has become more useful as a way to tap in to the discussions of the day than to broadcast their own thoughts. And once you get pulled in, you might just find you have something to say after all.

Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, suggests that naysayers simply log on to Twitter’s home page and search for a topic they are interested in, whether it’s their favorite sports team, the name of their company or a topic in the news.

Within a minute, they understand the appeal, he said.

Twitter users write 50 million messages a day. For the holdouts, here are a few ways to make Twitter work for you.

A CUSTOM NEWS FEED By the time Bridget Baker, who works in public relations in Seattle, checks Google Reader while eating lunch at her desk, she has already read most of the articles in her feed because she saw them on Twitter.

In the year since she joined, she has written only 17 posts. “I tend to be a pretty private person. and I don’t feel I have anything that needs to be said,” she said. Yet she opens Twitter first thing each morning and follows friends, bloggers and thought leaders who post about politics, religion, fashion and food.

People with shared interests become your editor and Twitter becomes an alternative RSS feed. Find those people by searching Twitter directories, like WeFollow or Just Tweet It, and by following people whom others repeat or mention.

One-fifth of posts and 57 percent of repeat messages contain a link, proving that this is an increasingly popular way to spread news, said Dan Zarrella, a social media scientist who works at a software company called HubSpot. A quick scan reveals the news of the moment as the most important stories of the day bubble up and are reposted.

For instance, when Audi showed an ad for a green car during the Super Bowl, Chip Giller, the founder of Grist, an environmental news site, immediately noticed a debate about the car’s environmental merits on Twitter. Sure enough, the next day it was a big story.

CHECK YOUR LISTS Twitter is such a fast-moving stream that you may not want to follow everyone who posts about your interests. That’s one reason Twitter invented Lists, which anyone can create. Someone could separate celebrity users, owners of food carts in New York or tech pundits, for example, so they get an unadulterated stream of news on only the topic they want at that moment.

If you don’t know who the best users are on a favorite topic, look for Lists on sites like Listorious or by checking profiles.

Janessa Goldbeck works in Washington for a rights organization, the Genocide Intervention Network. Each morning, she checks a few Twitter Lists of people who work in human rights. “I don’t want to follow all those people, but I can get a snapshot of the landscape each day by looking at the Lists,” she said. “It’s the quickest, most personalized news filter you could imagine.”

ATTEND A CONFERENCE, VIRTUALLY Most conferences these days have a Twitter hashtag. At the exclusive TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., in February, for example, attendees added #TED to the end of their posts.

By searching #TED on Twitter, people could read the latest updates (and skip the $6,000 attendance fee). People wrote quotes from the speakers, like this one: “ ‘If I only had only one wish for the next 50 years, it’d be to invent the thing that halves the cost of CO2’ — Bill Gates #TED.”

Others told us what we were lucky to be missing: “last talk on evolution #TED was obvious, boring and put audience to sleep.”

WHAT’S AROUND YOU RIGHT NOW Twitter is working on ways to deliver news nearby, like alerts about an earthquake or the closing of a bridge, Mr. Stone said.

Twitter’s list of trending topics can now be searched by city. On Wednesday, “TAKS” was a trending topic in San Antonio because schools were giving the annual achievement test of that name, while “Dennis Seidenberg” was trending in Boston because the Boston Bruins had acquired the hockey player from Florida.

Some Twitter apps, like Tweetie and TwitterLocal, let you search posts near you. Check the Web site Happn.in to see the most discussed topics in your area.

People are coming up with makeshift ways to do something similar. During the recent snowstorm in Washington, people added #snowpocalypse to the end of their posts. By searching that term, Ms. Goldbeck said she read news about closings of government offices and Metro stops before she heard it elsewhere.

ASK QUESTIONS Once your Twitter writer’s block lifts, you can use Twitter to ask questions when you don’t know whom to ask.

Ask where to eat dinner in a new city, for example, or how to extend your iPhone’s battery life, and you are sure to get answers.

Some people are even using Twitter for more urgent questions. Bertalan Meskó, a medical student at the University of Debrecen in Hungary, wrote a post about a patient with mysterious symptoms: “Strange case today in internal medicine rotation. 16 years old boy with acute pancreatitis (for the 6th! time). Any ideas?”

Within hours, specialists worldwide had responded, suggesting gallstones, lupus or growths on the pancreas. One of the suggestions helped the doctors with a diagnosis.

“It would have been impossible to find that specialist through e-mail, because we had no idea who to contact,” Mr. Meskó said.

How to make money with Twitter

Every time we turn around we’re hearing about another social networking site offering users unlimited possibilities. Twitter is just such a site. Twitter is a very popular site that’s gaining more popularity every day. Members are constantly “tweaking” their friends, family members and even work associates! It seems like almost every one of all ages has a Twitter account today and many are making money doing it. Yes, you can make money with Twitter. Join the thousands of others that are doing that very thing. While you won’t become a millionaire overnight, Twitter offers you a great chance to earn some real cash!

Twitter Offers Many Money-Making Opportunities

There are several ways you can make money with Twitter. Before you can begin making money on Twitter, you will need lots of contacts the better. It’s been shown that Twitter users are getting as many as 20,000 followers within just the first month or two of joining. Imagine if you made a sale to just 1% of these followers: you’d have sold to 200 people. The opportunities to make money are endless with Twitter. So make as many friends as you can on Twitter and develop a good trusting relationship with these users. The more Twitter friends you make, the better your opportunity to make money.

Become an Affiliate on Twitter

Affiliate marketing is a great way to make money online while doing very little in the way of work. Most online companies offer an affiliate program to anyone interested. Find a company that offers affiliate marketing (it will be on the bottom of their website). Sign up and wait to hear from them. They’ll check out your Twitter page and make sure it offers good opportunities for sales. Once they’ve accepted you as an affiliate, you’re all set to go.

Put up an attractive ad for the business and promote it to all your followers. The more of your followers you can get to purchase the product, the more money you’ll make. Since Twitter is such a large social networking site, the possibilities just keep getting bigger and bigger. Some companies will even pay if a person just clicks on the ad without making a sale, although these are rarer. Affiliate marketing is a very popular way to make money and if you have a Twitter page anyways (who doesn’t?), you may as well make some money at the same time.

Make Money on Twitter with RevTwt

RevTwt is a platform that deals with CPC (cost per click) and allows you to make money from your tweets. For those unfamiliar with Twitter, tweets are messages and posts you put on your Twitter page.

Sign up for an account with RevTwt and they’ll check out your Twitter profile. After doing this, they’ll allow you to put ads for different products or services on your Twitter page. Each time someone clicks on these ads, you can make money.

As you can see, there’s a lot of money to be made off of Twitter but the key is to get as many followers as possible so make all the friends you can!

How to make money with Facebook

If you haven’t heard of Facebook by now, you must be one of the few people on the planet who hasn’t. It’s one of the biggest social networking sites on the internet, and as such it offers a great way to get in touch with like minded people who have similar interests to you.

But while many social networking sites don’t particularly like blatant advertising on their pages, Facebook doesn’t fall into that group. There are ways and means to do most things online, and with Facebook the answer is in attracting the right kind of people to your profile page.

There is one other main feature that makes Facebook well worth looking at for making money though, and that will be revealed if you read the rest of this entry.

Once you have signed up to Facebook your first step should be to think about how you want to present yourself. I say that because you don’t have to be yourself in order to make money from Facebook. Don’t forget that you want to attract the attention of a specific group of people here, so that you become known as someone who is something of an expert on one particular subject. So choose wisely!

Go for a popular niche that you have an interest in yourself, and develop your persona in that area. If you already have something of a web presence in this area then you’ll find it will help you as more and more people become aware of who you are and what you know about.

Your first port of call, if you have anything second hand to sell which is related to your niche, is the Marketplace. It’s free to place ads in the Marketplace and there is no limit on how many you can place, so if for example you come across a bargain lot of books on your subject on eBay or at a yard sale you can list them all individually on Facebook and sell them on for a profit.

If you have a budget to spend on advertising and you have some external websites you want to promote, you can try out the Social Ads to see what benefits you get from them. It is well worth reading through the relevant help section to see what is involved though, as it is quite in depth.

The main benefit to being a member of Facebook is that you can build and use any number of applications to perform certain tasks on your profile page. Facebook doesn’t frown at users making money from their Facebook page, and indeed many people link in to other websites outside of Facebook itself. People are constantly building new applications and many of them are used by many different users to create pages that appeal to their own particular needs.

This is partly why you will succeed in making more money from Facebook if you brand yourself carefully before you get started on the site. Figure out what it is you want to do and what you want to achieve. If you already have a website up and running then you will be able to link into that, so keep the look and feel of your Facebook page in the same vein as your site.

But while you can link to other sites outside of Facebook, some people also sprinkle some affiliate links on their actual Facebook page itself. For example, some quick research revealed one person who links into a range of ClickBank products on their page and does well from doing so.

So long as you start from a strong position with a particular focus and brand in mind, you can do well by experimenting with all the benefits that Facebook offers. Take time to build up a network of friends and make sure you become known for being an expert in your particular sphere of interest.

How to make money with MySpace

If you are already a member of MySpace you will know that they don’t exactly take kindly to people promoting their wares on the website. But if that’s the case, how do you make money by using the site?

The answer is simple – you do it subtly and in a way that will naturally encourage people to follow what you are saying and go elsewhere to find out more.

The key to success is to build a profile that tells people who you are and what you are about – which will brand you as an expert in a particular area and get you remembered for all the right reasons when you want to promote your affiliate links online.

So what do you get when you join MySpace? First and foremost you get a space of your own to tell the world who you are. It’s a good idea to look up some other random pages by other people to see how they use theirs, particularly if they are internet marketers who have ulterior motives for joining this social networking site.

You will get your own MySpace URL that can be promoted elsewhere, but the most important section of your profile page is the About Me section, as this is your chance to tell people what your interests are. If you are promoting products in a particular niche topic, make sure your profile is relevant to that niche in order to be seen as something of an expert. If you do this people will remember you and be more interested in seeing what you have to say when they need information on that topic.

If you have a presence elsewhere online – a blog, a website, and any other social networking sites that maybe aren’t quite so strict about not promoting your business as MySpace is – make sure you include them in your links section. This will encourage more traffic to flow between all your web presences, and you’ll start to make more sales as a result.

You can also make good use of the blog you get on MySpace; the great thing about this is that you can include hyperlinks (clickable links) to other websites. Again, you don’t want to be trying to sell directly off this but you could set up a page on Squidoo – a site that welcomes the idea of making money from a free web page, and you’ll find out more about it in a later post – or promote affiliate links or products on your own website that you can link into.

I’m sure you can see by now that the way to make money from having an account with MySpace is to do so indirectly. Before you post anything new to your MySpace page or blog, ask yourself if you are blatantly advertising or doing so in a more subtle way. There is no reason why you can’t recommend your own website that is packed full of information on your specialist subject and hopefully make some sales off there as a result.