Adewasco2k

Let's go...

We will continue...

How do you push your bulk sms business to people? How do you make big sales?

Before that, I want to quickly talk to you about your domain name, hosting and cron job.

Domain name.
Pls in choosing a domain, try to choose a catchy name. And a short name also. Maybe 11 characters down. Choose a name that has the 'sms' or 'bulksms' in it. Make out time to brainstorm and write down about fifty names. Then go to www.name.com and start checking for availability. Most of them will not be available. If you get 10 that are available, stare on the 10 names until you see the one that rings a bell in your mind, then register it.

Hosting.
You can start with the normal shared hosting. However, I will encourage you to start making plans for VPS hosting. Bulk sms website consume lots of cpu and so you need a higher plan. I have about six busy bulk sms websites under my account, and so we use a vps hosting. We are even making plans to migrate to Dedicated server. If your hosting is not high enough, your clients may experience 504 gateway timeout when they want to send sms to thousands of numbers. Start with a shared hosting, but start making plans to upgrade. I pay about 20k per month for hosting.

Cron job.
This is responsible for sms scheduling. If your host uses cpanel, you can add your cron jobs. However, it imparts on the cpu of shared hosting. And if you reach monthly cpu limit, your host will disable your account and your website will not be accessible again until new month or you upgrade. To avoid cron job wahala, I host all my cron jobs separately. With $50 per year, I host my cron jobs at www.easycron.com.

To be continued...

amarawa:
I will be glad to get feedback when you are done with spectranet because I asked them for static public IP address too They said they only give it to organizations and not individuals and it comes with a price. I currently use Teamviewer for remote connections but prefer VPN.

I contacted spectranet and they said that the requirements are:
* CAC registration certificate
* Id Card (National Id card, driving license or intl passport)
* Passport photograph
* Prove of address (utility bill)
* A letter of request for a static ip on company's letterhead

and then fill a form they attached to the email and send everything to care@spectranet.com.ng and then send the hard copies to any nearest branch of spectranet.

I have met the above requirements. I have a registered company with cac - Bold ICT Solutions.

I asked them about the cost, they said they offer it FREE to registered companies.

I am happy. Although I was ready to pay them.

I am in talks with spectranet.com.ng now. Thanks to you all.

persius555:
Op, i suggest u give a brief insight on the purpose of the configuration since members are willing to help. Help the members to help u.

My bulk sms international gateway is requesting me to send a static ip to them so that they use it to setup an account for me.

crotsz:
Dude for u to get static ip u need an ISP dat issues static IP. mobile carriers like airtel don't give out static IP only dynamic.

So are the ISP people in Nigeria?
My bulk sms international gateway is requesting me to send a static ip to them so that they use it to setup an account for me.

shawlxAk:


What are you testing? If you are connecting to the internet via home mobile broadband as you hinted, then there is no point assigning a static IP to your computer. As a home user, you will always be assigned a private IP address with which to access the Internet via your ISP's public IP address.
ISPs give static IP usually to business broadband customers for a fee.

Does that mean I should call airtel to request a static ip from them?

Fulaman198:


Just follow the instructions here and provide screenshots with issues you may be having.

I have created it. How do I know I got it right. How can I test it.

chudeTV:
there is a video tutorial here on how to do this

http://chudetv.com/How-To-Set-Your-Computer-To-Use-A-Static-IP-Address_v1085

Regards..

Thank you. You dont have it in text format. I am on a small phone so i cant watch the video.

Fulaman198:


Your default gateway is always a local IP address, meaning you never call your Mobile carrier.

I'm trying to not to get too technical here. Please tell me what you are trying to do exactly. I don't want to confuse you with too much information. Sometimes we network engineers don't know when to stop.

The issue is that I want to setup a static ip on my computer. I have read lots of info online. I have types ipconfig/all in cmd.exe while connected to the internet and i saw an ip, subnet mask and default gateway of 0.0.0.0, but when i put that, the system will raise an alarm that it must start with 1. I want to setup a static ip. My problem now is how and where to get those numbers.

Fulaman198:


What do you mean please be more specific

To configure a static IP on a windows machine, go to Network and sharing centre, where it says connections, click on your connection type (it will either be Wireless or Ethernet). Click on Properties, go to where it says Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) click on properties again, then you will see a window like this:

Click on "use the following address" to configure IP address information statically.

Typically speaking, on a home network, most subnet masks are /24 (or 255.255.255.0). Default Gateway is the IP address that your router is located at (your gateway to the internet). Preferred DNS (Domain Name server) is what resolves IP addresses to text URLs. So an example is Google's DNS server(s). One of them is located at the IP address of 8.8.8.8

Typically speaking, your ISP provides DNS services. I am not with you, so I don't know your configuration.

Thank you.

So in a nutshell, I am the one to define the ip i want, then subnet mask wil enter automatically. Now how do I get the default gateway? I use airtel sim in my modem, should I call airtel to ask them about the gateway ip?

Pls I need help on how to configure a static local ip address for my computer.
I need to get the ip, subnet mask, default gateway and preferred dns.

Let's go on...
There are three things that may hinder the success of your bulk sms business.

1. Selling GSM Database.
If you are part of those young boys that run 'me too bulk sms business' and sell so called gsm database, then you are not yet ready for a serious bulk sms business. Most serious clients that understand what privacy is all about, will never patronize your sms business. Again, selling the gsm database is even against NCC privacy rules. You cannot grab people's numbers and start selling them to whoever that cares to give you few thousand Naira.

2. Slow Website.
You must optimize your bulk sms website to be loading fast. You need to install some caching extension, enable joomla default caching option. Enable cache options on your host cpanel. Optimize your images to reduce the size.

3. Clunky and Unresponsive Website.
You have to find a way to make your joomla website responsive and clean. There 101 premium and free joomla responsive joomla templates you can use.

Stay tuned...

Before we proceed, I want to point out two things you need to know.

1. Free sms.
You are free to configure your portal to give free sms units to new registered users. However, I want to tell you that serious users are not after the free sms. It's only the secondary school guys that want to show to their friends that they can receive sms with a custom sender id from them. And so, they register with about three emails to use your free sms units. On our portal, we dont give free sms units to new members. And people never complained. Most of our sms users register and buy sms immediately to start sending their serious sms campaign. They are not out for childish playing around. I remember telling a very big church that i will give them 500 sms units to test the platform, the pastor asked me 'for what? What is 500 sms units?' They went ahead to transfer 180,000 Naira to our firstbank account for 100,000 sms units.

2. Your Pricing.
Your pricing matters. There are some novice in this business that charge rediculous cheap prices in order to get customers. It doesnt work. Serious users dont usually look at your pricing model. There was a time we were selling at #1.60kobo per sms. Then to #1.70kobo and finally to #1.80kobo. Till today, our clients never complained. We reviewed our pricing model of course because of the Dollar to Naira hick. One Bishop even said to us, 'I hope your sms is #4 because we are not ready to pay more than #4.' I told him that we sell sms at #1.80kobo and he was shocked. So, make your pricing moderate. Not too costly and not too cheap. Again, configure your portal send sms at 1 unit. Clients hate it when they wil have to do unnecessary calculations. They want 1000 sms units to send sms to 1000 gsm numbers as long as the sms is 1 page. Instead of making your unit for 80kobo and then make 1 sms to deduct 2 units, which in essence, you are selling at 1.60kobo. Why not just spell it out that you sell sms at 1.60kobo and 1 unit is equals to 1 sms?

Stay tuned...

Let us proceed. After integrating your sms provider's API, it's now time to start marketing your bulk sms website.

Before then, I want to quickly point out two things. I want you to remove index.php from your website url. Like having something like this www.yoursmswebsite.com/index.php or www.yoursmswebsite.com/index.php/pricing. You should instead have a clean url like www.yoursmswebsite.com or www.yoursmswebsite.com/pricing.

How do you remove index.php from your website url? Go to Global Configuration in your joomla backend and click on 'Site' tab. Scroll down to url setting and choose 'Seo friendly url'. Then go to your public_html through ftp and change your 'htaccess.txt' to '.htaccess' and then go and refresh your website. The index.php will no longer be there.

Again, download and install 'Admin Tool' extension. After installing it, click on it and its interface will open. Click on 'Fix Permissions' and let it fix your joomla site permissions. After that click on 'Clean Temp directory', after that, click on 'Purge Session.' You are done.

Again, I want you to create a clean url for your spc menu items. Just create a new menu and then start creating menu items inside it. Create for 'Compose Sms' so that the url wil be clean like www.yoursmswebsite.com/compose-sms and not something like www.yoursmswebsite.com/com_spc+compose+sms or something like that.

Again, you need to walk into any office of the Corporate Affairs Commission and register a nice business name. Then when you have gotten your CAC certificate, go to Tax office to obtain your TIN (Tax Identification Number). With your CAC certificate, TIN, ID card, utility bill, walk into First Bank and GTBank and open a corporate account. 90% of clients are skeptical paying into a personal account. They see your business as a childish thing. Again, some of these big companies or churches wil like to pay in Cheque instead of cash. And you know that cheque doesnt enter personal account that is a savings account. For instance, I attracted Fan Milk Nig. Ltd to my portal because they saw it as not just a 'me too bulk sms portal' but a business owned by a corporate entity.

Just make out time to package your business. Packaging matters. Unless you want to do hit and run business. But if you are like me that will remain in bulk sms business to the end, then you must be serious with the business.

The difference between kpekere and plaintain chips is PACKAGING!

Next up, we will learn some bulk sms marketing or advertising tip, secrets and strategies.

Ask me questions...

Dionjerry:
sms portal creator 4 and 3 sold call 08106436062 or email dionjerry442@gmail.com

Hello Adewasco2k, rule 9 has been violated here. This is a hacked spc. Afrisoft has not authorized any person to sell their spc for them.

Dionjerry:
sms portal creator 4 and 3 sold call 08106436062 or email dionjerry442@gmail.com

Scammer and Spammer. Carry your virus spc comot here.

adeola9:


I have received some mails from good webmasters who have given me link to some of the SMS portal they have designed before.

Liar. Nobody sent you any email.

adeola9:

They are all about making money, copy and paste series of same website for a thousand clients.

And yet, you want us to give you the exact design of 'another person's' website.

Onyengbu, thank you. If you read my posts above, you will see where I mentioned that this is a cheap publicity.

The OP is still a learner.

julius99:
Please am having issue with my website. When a customer registers on my website they are unable to receive the activation link on their email to activate their account. And also I don't receive the notification that someone has registered on the website. Instead this is the mail I receive from yahoo:
"A message that you sent was rejected by the local scanning code that
checks incoming messages on this system. The following error was given:

Sorry, you don't havepermission to send email from this server with a
header thatstates the email is from yahoo.com.

------ This is a copy of your message, including all the headers."

Kindly help with ideals on how to fix this issue

Send me email at: smsnaija247@gmail.com so that I help you look into that. Cheers.

adeola9:


Wonder why Nigerian webmaster are not so good as claimed, if i wanted a website designed for me exactly, lots of guys would do that for me on freelancer (mostly indians, canadians and americans) even if you can build me a new model house, as long as i insist i want a face me - i face you, respect your customer's wish and do just what he wants, if you cant, then look elsewhere and let the truly good webmaster do the Job.

No need of insulting anyone because of what he/she wants. The website might be unresponsive, i have used it for more than 5 years and i have never had issues with it delivering to me on my needs of it and because my company have expanded so much, i thought it wise to have ours designed for us instead. I believe in it and that is just what i want.

Thanks.

Any webmaster that knows what he's doing and understands standard, will not always do what his clients wants. 99.9% of people like you dont know a thing about web technology and so they must be guided. So if a client comes and show me a website designed 90s with table as the the layout and he insist I build it like that, should I start designing the website with table? God forbid.

Tmonex:
So which one is your portal using..

lol. It's personal to Bold ICT Solutions, the owners of SMSnaija247. Thanks.

adeola9:


Unfortunately that is EXACTLY what i want for reasons known to me. Jet or No Jet Age, i want that website designed for me as a prototype with all the features including the Gateway API and i'll be glad i have it done the way i had wanted.

Thanks

Nonshenshi. Cheap marketing stunt. How can you insist on having a crappy unresponsive website design? You can talk of having EXACT FEATURES not EXACT DESIGN because the DESIGN sucks.

There are couple of places to get your premium bulk sms API. These companies have direct connection and link with all the gsm operators in Nigeria and other countries. They sell in Euros and you have to pay online from their websites or through paypal. There are charges you incur each time you make a payment. Like paypal charges 4.9% of each payment. Other gateways they use on their websites charge about 2.85%.

For you to be able to make these payments, you must either have a paypal account or a bank token for internet banking. The reason for a bank token is because there are some payment gateways that demand mastercard secure code if you are using mastercard. And for you to get a mastercard secure code, you will need to make a request of certain PIN from your internet banking platform using your token to authenticate it. After that, you will be taken to the mastercard secure code website where you will register and get your secure code.

These are international bulk sms gateways you can use.

1. INFOBIP - www.infobip.com
This is a company from Netherlands. They have office in Ikeja Lagos. They are very reliable, but there pricing model for a starter is actually very high. Except you want to be selling at #2 or #2.50Kobo per sms, which is ok. There are people selling at that price and their clients are still buying from them. In bulk sms, delivery is the king, not the price. A client will be ready to pay you #3 per sms as long as the sms get delivered within seconds. If you want to use them, you can go to their website and send them a message. They will reply you and an account manager will be assigned to you and from there, things will fall into place.

PRICE MODEL:
AIRTEL - 0.0062 Euro (#1.40kobo)
ETISALAT - 0.0062 Euro (#1.40kobo)
GLO - 0.0075 Euro (#1.70kobo)
MTN - 0.0071 Euro (#1.60kobo)

2. ROUTESMS - www.routesms.com
This is an Indian company. They are very good at what they do. They have economical and premium routes. Their economical route is very cheap, but it has delivery issues. Their premium route delivers sms in 1 second. And their premium route is even cheap. There is no initial purchase. You can start with 50 Euros.

PRICE MODEL:
AIRTEL - 0.0045 Euro (#1.08kobo)
ETISALAT - 0.0045 Euro (#1.08kobo)
GLO - 0.0060 Euro (#1.34kobo)
MTN - 0.0052 Euro (#1.16kobo)

3. ARUHAT - www.aruhat.com
This is an Indian company also. They are also very reliable. But their initial purchase must be 500 Euros and their sms units have validity period.

4. CNS NETWORK - www.cs-networks.net
This is also an Indian company. They are also very good. But I remember chatting with one of their customers' support, and she told me (whether by mistake or what) that routesms is very good. We were discussing something and I mentioned routesms, and she told me that they are very good.

PRICE MODEL:
AIRTEL - 0.0050 Euro (#1.12kobo)
MTN - 0.0055 Euro (#1.23kobo)
ETISALAT - 0.0055 Euro (#1.23kobo)
GLO - 0.0050 Euro (#1.12kobo)

The pricing model of Routesms and Aruhat are almost the same. Just contact all of them and request for their pricing model. Make sure you ask them about validity period of the sms units. For instance, Aruhat will initially tell you that the sms units expire after 6 months, but if you insist, they will tell you that they will make yours not to expire. You will have to negotiate everything, including prices. Talking about prices, you cannot get a level head pricing for all the networks. Some networks will be cheaper, some will be higher. How do you get a level ground for your pricing? Just add the four prices together and divide into four and you will get a level price for each of them. Then you can now come up with your own price for your clients.

Check the sms price in Euro with the current Euro-Naira exchange rate. I did the calculation above with 1 Euro to 224 Naira.

When you have chosen the company you want after comparing and asking questions from their support team, they will create your account for you with a test sms units. You will get their HTTP API urls and integrate on your bulk sms application.

The way they credit you is not the normal way we credit people. For instance, if you pay 50 Euros, you will be credited with 50 Euros. But this 50 Euros in actual sense can send up to 9,000 sms. So as you send, they will be deducting it from your 50 Euros. For instance, let's say you have 50 Euros now and you send one sms, your balance will look like this: 49.2228 and so on.

Stay tuned...

RothmasPop:

Hey wassup,can you gree your reseller package for 15k?

We will collect 10k if you will get spc4, domain and hosting by yourself.

sodson11:
Ok. Now to the next part of the tutorial, could you explain how to get a good api

Stay tuned bro. I will expose everything in due time.