You might have noticed that there are a growing number of text-based premium rate information services. This is the sort of thing I mean: You text a ‘short code’ mobile phone number. In return you get some kind of useful information, such as a valuation on a car you want to buy, stock and share prices or flight arrival times by SMS text. The information is paid for by a premium rate charge, such as £1 or £1.50 on your mobile phone bill.
But what you might not know is this: The technology behind running such services has recently become very simple, cheap and accessible to everyone. No longer do you need to be a telecoms giant to get involved. Now, even small entrepreneurs can get involved in writing and selling premium rate texts.
It’s a lot easier than you think to get started. You will need some imagination. You’ll need to be able to come up with some good ideas for information you can sell in text messages. A leaning for writing interesting, snappy texts will come in handy too. But, since text messages are usually fairly short, you don’t need to be a skilled writer
Here are some good subject ideas: Sport, entertainment, gaming, food and drink, health and fitness, hobbies, money saving, jokes, business information. Each text only has to be short, as they are limited to 160 characters.
So how do you sell premium rate texts?
The easiest way is to use an SMS text messaging bureau as your service provider. When you do this they will give you what is called an SMS short codeto use for your information service. Short codes are special numbers (usually five digits like 81000 for example) which have been allocated to text information services. SMS short code numbers offer another very clever facility too…. to charge the person who receives the text for it, rather than the sender.
Once everything is set up you upload the information you want to sell to the bureau and their system does the rest. You can also change or update it whenever you like. If you want to send texts on a subscription basis, such as weekly or even daily, you can do that too.
You’ll also need to do some marketing. You can advertise in the press, or promote your service using Twitter, Facebook or a blog and so on.
How much money could you make?
The possible charges for a premium rate text are: 25p, 50p, £1, £1.50, £3.50, £5 – and £10 in some cases. Let’s say you charge £1.50 per text.
Now, for a text for which the customer pays £1.50 the network provider actually receives about £1.27. From this the service provider (the bureau who supplies your SMS service) will pay you an outpayment of, typically, 35p. (This varies slightly according to the network and volume of texts.)
So if you attracted 500 texts in a week you’d receive £175 a week. If you made it a subscription service and sent out one text every week you’d receive £9,100 in a year!