Earn money writing short texts – your own SMS texting business

You may have noticed that there is a growing number of premium text-based fare information services. This is the kind of thing I’m referring to: send a text message with a ‘short code’ mobile phone number. In return, you get some useful information, like a valuation on why you want to buy, stocks and quotes, or flight arrival times via text message. The information is paid for at a premium rate charge, such as £1 or £1.50 on your mobile phone bill.

But what you may not know is this: the technology behind running such services has recently become very simple, cheap and accessible to everyone. You no longer have to be a telecommunications giant to participate. Now, even small business owners can participate in writing and selling texts at a premium rate.

It is much easier than you think to start. You will need some imagination. You’ll need to be able to think of some good ideas for information you can sell in text messages. A penchant for writing engaging and snappy text will also come in handy. But, since text messages are usually quite short, you don’t need to be an expert writer.

Here are some good topic ideas: sports, entertainment, games, food and drink, health and fitness, hobbies, saving money, jokes, business information. Each text just has to be short as they are limited to 160 characters.

So how are premium rate texts sold?

The easiest way is to use an SMS text messaging office as your service provider. When you do this, they will give you what is called an SMS short code to use for their information service. Short codes are special numbers (usually five digits like 81000, for example) that have been assigned to text information services. SMS short code numbers also offer another very clever feature… charging the person who receives the text, instead of the sender.

Once everything is set up, you upload the information you want to sell to the office and their system does the rest. You can also change or update it whenever you want. If you want to text on a subscription basis, like weekly or even daily, you can do that too.

You will also have to do some marketing. You can advertise in the press or promote your service through Twitter, Facebook or a blog, etc.

How much money could you earn?

Possible charges for a premium rate text message are: 25p, 50p, £1, £1.50, £3.50, £5 and £10 in some cases. Let’s say you charge £1.50 per text message.

Now, for a text message for which the customer pays £1.50, the network provider actually receives around £1.27. From this, the service provider (the office that provides your SMS service) will pay you an outlay of typically 35 pence. (This varies slightly by network and volume of texts.)

So if you attracted 500 texts in a week, you would receive £175 per week. If you made it a subscription service and sent a text every week, you’d receive £9,100 in a year!