In the world of SMS marketing there are a couple of important factors: sms short codes and keywords attached to those short codes. How hard is it to procure a short code? Well, it’s not that hard. It just takes some money and some time. Short code procurement takes about 4 to 6 weeks to procure and will cost you your first 3 months billing up front. Well, what’s the monthly cost of an SMS short code? That depends. Do you want a randomly generated code or a vanity number? If you have a randomly generated short code assigned to you, it will cost you $500/month. However, it’s $1000/month if you wish to make it a vanity number like CHURCH or PIZZA or some other crazy thing. So, the first three months up-front is going to cost between $1,500 and $3,000 clams.

Now what about the keywords associated with the short code you purchased. Oh, that easy compared to the short code itself. Or, is it? Well, it may not cost as much in the long-run to have a keyword selector tool, but initially it may be somewhat of an investment. Why? Well, because you’ve got to hire a programmer to create a keyword selector tool. Once this mechanism is in place, the keywords are easily attained.However, unless you do what Twitter does and place an @ prior to each keyword, then you’ll run out of keywords quickly if you’re distributing to a mass audience. So, one way to combat this is to do what Mobivity has done and just sell keywords for $20/month. They also charge a per message amount as well. Talk about making that $500/month back from their short code costs.

So, I was personally curious if anyone was in the industry just out there selling Keywords attached to their personal Short Code. So, I went to a domain name purchaser and did some searches to see what domains were available. I couldn’t believe what I found! ShortCodeKeywords.com as well as ShortCodeKeyword.com were both available. I snatched them up quickly. Someday, someone, perhaps a Mobivity clone, is going to take all their resources and just sell Keywords associated with their Short Code. It’s only a matter of time. We plan on doing it as well. It just remains to be seen whose gonna jump first. It will be lucrative when they do.