Best Blackhat Forum

Dear Offline Warrior,

I often hear about the frustrations with SMS marketing systems where you have to share a shortcode and pay big $$$ for just one keyword. Texting a confusing keyword to a shortcode can limit the number of opt-ins.

For a couple of years now I've been developing tools that use the powerful twilio.com platform but I was surprised to not find any Wordpress plugins that made it easy for the offline niche to use twilio.

This Twilio Wordpress Plugin allows you to easily build and manage SMS marketing lists through the familiar Wordpress interface. And, because you're using local U.S. numbers there are a lot of advantages.

If you're new to text message marketing, something that's important to understand is the difference between a shortcode and a longcode. A shortcode is a 5 or 6 digit number that the subscriber sends their text message to in order to subscribe or interact with the SMS system. Like tv voting where a viewer texts the word "vote" to 54545 - the 54545 number is the "shortcode".

Shortcodes have to be approved and accepted by each mobile company for it to work on their network. The process takes weeks or months and is very expensive. For this reason, an SMS marketing/list company will buy and set up the shortcode and then lease "keywords" on their system to marketers like you. A keyword is how their system knows what member to send the text message to. If you want to market a pizza shop, there's a good chance you might want to use the word "pizza" in a campaign, like text the word "pizza" to 54545. Well, on a typical shortcode system, someone else probably is already using the keyword "pizza", which means you can't use it. This means keywords are precious and there's a lot of competition. This also means keywords cost a lot of money. Not so with longcodes.

A "longcode" is just a regular local phone number. Longcodes are very inexpensive - only $1 per month and it belongs to only you. That means you can use any keyword you want and as many as you want and NEVER PAY MORE.

Another nightmare I've seen with shortcodes is that since they are typically shared with hundreds or thousands of other users, someone might be spamming or abusing others with the same shortcode you're using. I saw a shortcode get dropped by the mobile companies for this very reason and EVERYONE lost the service. This affected countless businesses.




The abilitiy to call-to-subscribe adds a huge advantage over other systems. This means ANYONE with a mobile phone can quickly and easily get on your list and it gives you a unique advantage when attracting local business to use your services. This is especially effective with RADIO advertising. It's much easier (and a bit safer) to dial a phone number rather than texting a keyword to a shortcode WHILE DRIVING!