Driving Traffic To Your Website With SMS Mobile Phone Advertising

I’ve recently tried Mobile Phone Advertising for  a couple of my websites that for one reason or another, just didn’t seem to get a lot of visitors.

Mobile phone advertising for a brick and mortar business, through the use of text messaging, isn’t a novel idea. However,  I was curious to see if it was worth getting an account set up and promoting a website or two. You see, I do some advertising locally. Vinyl decals on my cars, stickers on dumpsters, posters on telephone poles, and other methods that don’t drive a lot of traffic to my websites. People just don’t write down your website name while they are driving, to visit it after they arrive home and have access to a computer.

I needed a way for them to remember it easily. With almost a Billion texts being sent each day it’s pretty obvious that people love sending and receiving text messages.

I wanted to take advantage of those texts, so I gave it a try.

First, I needed to find an inexpensive Mobile Phone Advertising company that would not only give me an inexpensive account, but I wouldn’t mind a free trial, as well. That wasn’t as easy as it sounds. There are a number of businesses out there and pricing can vary greatly. Some want as much as $49/mo for 250 texts and then they want to charge a setup fee on top of it. Setup fee? Hey, some of us understand how difficult it isn’t to set up an account using a computer. I’m not paying some schmuck another $129 to key in my information on a computer program that takes all of 5 minutes to do.

It took some time, but I did find a Mobile Phone Advertising website that provided me with a great offer. Mobi Text Agent gave me the Promo Code of “textads” and directed me to their text platform using their link. I got a 1 month trial that doubled the features using their link. That gave me 50 text messages credits, 200 contact credits, 2000 email credits, and 2 Keywords of my choosing. If you are interested, THIS IS THE LINK. It will auto-generate the promo code and give you the double credits. I also liked the fact that if it didn’t work out I wasn’t obligated with a contract of any kind (it is not one of those, “Buy a year and get 1 month free” deals). Anyway, the platform is easy to use and it’s worth trying.

Back to my “experiment.”

Once I had my Mobile Phone Advertising account setup and chose my Keywords I began doing “my thing” in getting my Keyword seen. I had some bumper stickers made up to place on shopping mall trash cans, inside bus shelters, parking lot light posts, and other places where they would be seen, but unlikely to be removed any time soon. The stickers were simple. “Text (MY KEYWORD) to (MYSHORTCODE) for 50% off”. Of course, I’m not providing my keyword or shortcode number here because I’m not trying to sell you on my affiliate site. ;-) I also placed the free subscription widgets on a few of my websites.

And to my affiliate website is where I sent those who actually sent the Keyword I advertised. My automated response told them to visit (my website) where they would find discounts of up to 50% off retail on any item. I didn’t use the option of providing a link in the response message because the affiliate code isn’t always passed, should they actually buy something through their phone. I wanted them to have the website name on their phone so they would have it when they got home and got to a computer. The website is actually an affiliate website created to direct people to eBay. Yes, sellers on eBay do sell items that are 1/2 the price of retail, so I stayed within the boundaries of honesty.

The results? Not bad at all. It seems people will text the keyword without any knowledge of what it is about. I mean, “Text ( ) for 50% off”? How obscure is that? But, text they did and I was able to follow-up (weeks later) with another message promoting a different site that was heavy with Adsense ads. Once they text to your Keyword, they opt in to future messages until they opt out. It’s a great system and not considered “spamming.” I would only suggest you don’t abuse texting people, or I suspect they will opt out quickly.

So, the first month I saw an increase of $90 in affiliate sales and $40 in Adsense clicks – after deducting my costs of the bumper stickers and some windshield flyers (plus the cost of paying some local kids $5 each to plaster cars). The second month I increased my revenue another $340 over the previous month. The only thing I did different was to use the Mobile Phone Advertising, which now costs me $30/mo on an upgraded pre-paid plan.