Bulk SMS: How to make money in Nigeria

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Posted by Felix Okoli on Tuesday October 12, 2010 at 22:57:5:

I have actually written a lot about how to make money online in Nigeria but this particular topic focuses on how to make money in Nigeria, whether you are online or not. It is about an emerging trend in the country with the highest number of mobile phone users Africa and the most profitable GSM region currently for networks.
Most Bulk sms dealers in Nigeria are actually resellers who buy at a discount from popular web based bulk sms providers in the UK, India or the US. I just tried sending an sms to my mobile phone from a a website www.bulksms.com and it came just within 5 secs. It was that fast!
It is about SMS and bulk SMS yes. Bulk sms is more than one sms. An sms is a Short message service that you can normally send from a GSM phone. However, most of the text based services being offered currently by Nigerian Telecom networks are actually at around a price of N5 - N10 per sms. Now there are a lot of young people and companies who offer you a much lower discount for sending sms and the prices can come as low a N1.7 per sms, now beat that! But they offer their rates for only bulk purchases meaning that they sell wholesale and when you buy such bulk quantities, you would be able to get the best prices. These Bulk sms companies are making a Killing when it comes to their growing network of customers, the biggest being the 25 banks in Nigeria.
There are many banks currently in Nigeria and most of them if not all engage the services of indigenous Nigerian firms to provide them bulk sms and they buy in large quantities. What do the banks use bulk sms for? Well to service their millions of Nigerian customers who have subscribed for sms alert on their banking activities. Whether it is just making a deposit of withdrawals via ATMs, nowadays, banks always alert customers and for a fee too. They however rely on external suppliers who are mostly Nigerian registered companies dealing in bulk sms services to sell.

Becoming a Reseller in Nigeria
Well what it would require is for you to buy sms in bulk and then resell to Nigerian organisations and businesses. You can buy online and pay with your Nigerian bank issued Visa or Mastercard. Paypal or Monebookers is also accepted by bulksms.com but paying with a credit card should be preferred. There are also many other bulk sms websites where you can buy in bulk ans at a discount and resell here in Nigeria.

Getting the Right customers
Bulk sms is becoming a big business in Nigeria but it may be reducing to profitability because it is becoming public knowledge. However there is still a tonne of money to be made. For instance, you can buy sms credit for as low as N0.70 and sell for N1.70 or more depending on your customers. Some companies are already raking in as much as N1m profit every month from just selling to banks alone. However if you are not able to get clients from banks, there are other clients that you can get and still get to make your profit. There are Nigerian businesses, e-commerce websites you can help configure web to sms, Churches, Schools and other organisations that interact with the public and would need to send out messages from time to time without spending too much on advertising. Bulk sms can come to the rescue for them and your marketing and presentation is what really matters.

Integrating Bulk sms service for a website
If you are into e-commerce or you just have a website where you sell goods or interact with people constantly, you can use web based sms service to get an alert anytime someone drops a message without bothering to go online to check your mail. You can get notified every time you make a sale and so on with this service. Just buy the sms credits first and then get a webmaster to integrate it for you if it sounds too technical as it requires understanding and integrating your site with your bulk sms provider's SMS api to get it working.

Comments:
Re: Bulk SMS: How to make money in Nigeria Posted by Bulk SMS on Saturday October 22, 2011 at 8:34:43:

Send SMS to each person in the database is not possible for traders and therefore the concept of bulk sms emerged as the most effective tool for mobile marketing. Talk to your customers, the need for an hour and a Bulk SMS software, send messages to customers becomes more personal and further increasing the company. Bulk SMS companies can provide a more extraordinary for the target group and this may seem like the most wonderful marketing approach.