It can be challenging monetizing social media, especially when faced with endless followers, but no business prospects or product purchases from them. From affiliate offers to in-tweet advertising, these five methods could be the solution you need to earning income while building your online influence:

Twitter Advertising

A range of performance and view-based advertising options are available for Twitter users. While it is unlikely that you will be able to generate thousands of dollars from a single in-tweet advertisement, it is not uncommon for mid-level bloggers and popular web presences to draw in hundreds of dollars from well-targeted promotional tweets and inline advertisements.

Just like with any other performance-based offer, it is best to test various Twitter advertising platforms. Sign up with as many sponsored tweeting services as you can, and see which offers you the best per-tweet income. With just a little experimenting, top bloggers have been able to generate over $15,000 per month from their tweets alone.

Relevant Affiliate Offers

Irrelevant affiliate offers are not only completely ineffective from a marketing perspective, but they're a major annoyance to your followers and fans. Some marketers, particularly Twitter marketers, are hesitant to take on affiliate offers and pay-per-sale products. However, many other marketers are quite comfortable directing their traffic toward targeted and relevant offers.

Whenever you use affiliate offers as a monetizing strategy, you must think about relevancy and value. Is the product you are advertising something you would personally use? If not, don't advertise it. Does the product offer real value to your audience? If you answer yes to both, you have found something that could earn you money without alienating your audience.

Redirect Traffic to Your Blog

It is hard to monetize social media directly. Sure, there are advertising programs for Facebook and Myspace, but they are built to benefit the social network first, not its users. The hosting and maintenance costs associated with running a massive website like Facebook are truly staggering, and it's no surprise that many users have trouble monetizing their social media presence.

However, take things off-site and you will have a much easier time. Rather than trying to monetize your tweets or status updates directly, use your Twitter or Facebook account to guide followers and fans toward your blog. With a targeted audience and some intelligent on-blog advertising, traffic that was once worthless could turn into a major earner for you.

Use it as an SEO Resource

Most social media platforms have very high standing with the major search engines. With a few quick optimizations and linking strategies, a single profile link or a series of Twitter-based profile links could end up being the difference between a trickle of search traffic and a valuable search engine resource. Follow or no-follow, social media links can be a valuable piece of your search engine marketing strategy.

Build Real Events and Products, and Sell Directly

Facebook's built-in event features are fantastic for advertising, well, events. Rather than trying to monetize through online-only offers, why not put together a paid event and advertise it through Facebook? From one-off events to weekly meetups, thousands of online entrepreneurs are building their businesses through paid events marketed on social media platforms.