Loans via SMS messages

[Systreg]

I have a site that provides payday loans, I've had £217 commission from late February 2011 - Nov 8th 2011, then on Nov 9th, I noticed a lot of confirmed loan applications all of a sudden, more the next day, and it's still continuing now, there has been approaching £1400 in confirmed commission since Nov 9th.

I checked my Google analytics and noticed that there was a lot of traffic coming from Google, all the search terms were for a domain name which is similar to my domain, I checked their site and their domain was only regged recently, so I assumed they must be doing some sort of advertising in papers/magazines etc, as the post codes of the people applying for loans are UK wide.

I decided to email some of the successful loan applicants, and I've been told that the other loan company is using SMS to send people messages about getting a £1000 loan, people are then obviously searching Google for this other loan site, and my site ranks top for pretty much all terms they are searching for in relation to the other site, and I'm getting applications and commission as a result

Not being a mobile phone owner/user, it never crossed my mind that SMS could be used for advertising sites, does anyone know any services who do this sort of thing, or how I would go about advertising via SMS, it clearly pays dividends, so I would be interested in finding out pricing for this sort of thing.

 

[GreyWing]

It's the next big thing Kev, I for some reason regged smsloans.co.uk and now have (smsloan.co.uk) back in 2006-2007 and thought nothing of it until got a few enquiries.

I thought I'd be cheeky and ask £10k, a guy agreed and offered a shared profit scheme until a figure was reached and then he would get the name. He took ages to come back so I forgot about it and told him not to bother.

But had a few smaller offers since then around £5k, it is decent and started in Norway or Finland I think. Needless to say I wasn't a big fortune teller for the finance industry, it was a bit of luck that I regged it for some reason still unknown to me.

 

[Systreg]

Hi Graeme,

I don't think in this instance it is a loan being completed via SMS, it was more along the lines of, they said people could get a £1000 loan and then gave their site address in the SMS for people to go to, to apply for the loan.

Thanks for the info, loans ain't really my thing, hope you get a nice sale on your smsloan names

 

[GreyWing]

The way I understood it mate is that they go to that site to register, then if they get accepted they can just text an sms number there after. So they no longer need to go through the website when they need cash in the future.

 

[Systreg]

@ Graeme, having looked at their site, it appears to work the same as mine and other payday loan sites, you fill in the application form on their site, and they get back to you the same day if your application is successful.

They appear to run quite a lot of other payday loans sites as well, I wont post their site details for obvious reasons

 

[namestrands]

Its not just a UK think.. I have some .com domains along the same lines, one in particular gets mountains of traffic from france and at last count we had around 20 offers on it so far this year.

But like so many other projects finding the time to capitalise and research is just too difficult at the moment. Too much going on.

 

[Systreg]

Just been doing a bit looking around on Google, and it seems that to buy lists of opted in UK SMS number lists, the price varies between £120 - £200 per thousand numbers, usually discounted the more sets of 1000 you buy, all interesting stuff.

I was quite surprised that people get the domain name in the SMS, but still go and Google different variations of it, rather than going straight to the site, or maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not up with stuff like SMS and internet on mobile phones, I assume that if you get an SMS on your phone with a domain name included in the message, you can click the link to go straight to the site, or does it not come out as a clickable link in SMS messages?