SmsCoin – User-Friendly Way to Add an Extra Revenue Source for your Website

Today I am introducing you SmsCoin, a new monetization tool for all sorts of online publishers and our sponsor for the month. SmsCoin is a company that offers a broad range of SMS-based tools to add an extra monetization source (or at least an additional payment tool) to any online business that allows receiving payments from as many as 87 countries.

Premium SMS services offered by the company currently support businesses of more than 40 thousand websites, including some of the largest social networking, gaming and dating websites in Russia (so when you hear Russian DST is buying a stake in something new like Twitter in addition to their nice investment in Facebook, keep in mind this is how they make a good portion of their online money here). The list of customers is actually truly global as SmsCoin serves numerous online and real-life businesses in Europe and the US as well, building up on their success in Russia where they initially started.

For those of you who don’t know how such mobile payments work, the process is actually dead simple. A website owner sets up a payment gateway using a script provided to sell or grant access to a specific content or service on the website. Visitors are encouraged to send a text message to a short number following specific instructions and provided with a link to view the rates. If they choose to pay, they send the text message and their account with mobile carrier is charged a specific amount. A small portion of the amount will be retained by SmsCoin as a processing fee, a carrier gets its share while the publisher gets the rest of amount.

The advantages are obvious: payments are instant and do not require anything but a cell phone from a consumer – so everyone without even a PayPal account or a credit card can pay. But of course there is an obvious downside: the simplicity of the service makes it an appealing target for all sorts of frauds who might view it as a quick option to make some bucks and run away never to be found again.

But as with any other payment provider, buyers should not rely on the payment provider for security – they should instead pay attention to who they pay money to and why – and common sense is the only road to security here. Another disadvantage about SMS-based payments are usually the high commissions charged by mobile carriers (they vary from 30% and up depending on the country) so you should carefully study the list of countries and rates to know how much you will get in payouts from the amounts your visitors pay worldwide.

The tool is definitely universal enough for virtually any publisher to be able to add it as an additional payment tool. If you want to lock certain portions of your website content to your paying visitors or just look to raise donations for whatever purpose you have in mind, the company has a ready-made solution for you. And these are actually the simplest tools they have: you can also let users download content in exchange for a text message, add funds to their accounts in online stores or games or even pay for premium ads to get a good placement on your website.

For every publisher it is important that any new service they are adding to their websites is reliable and simple to integrate. And when it comes to money, it is even more important. This is why SmsCoin offers more than 150 ready-made scripts for the vast majority of popular content management systems, including even WordPress (so if you decide to sell your ebook right on your blog without any extra middlemen, you will be able to implement that without a huge deal of coding knowledge).

Here in Russia the market of mobile payments is huge and text messages actually serve as the most important payment gateway for numerous websites. It definitely makes sense in a country where not everyone has a credit card (or knows how to use it other than to withdraw cash from ATMs or trusts banks enough not to withdraw everything as soon as the funds arrive) and local PayPal competitors are cumbersome creatures that will take ages to add funds and charge a huge fee if you ever attempt to withdraw it. So it is no wonder that here you can buy virtually everything online with a text message.

Of course in the US and in Europe the situation with micropayments is in general way more friendly both to users and publishers. But still given that there’s no registration or setup fees, why not give it a try – who knows, your audience might appreciate the extra payment option. And since SmsCoin currently works with mobile carriers in 87 countries worldwide, for some of your users it might just be the most appealing option and they will appreciate your efforts.

Besides, there are some areas where such services actually have something unique to offer. In fact, where I see a huge potential for popular blogs using SmsCoin is in their sms:chat solution. A blogger simply sets up a sidebar widget to display the texts (and links!) received via text messages from visitors for a fee – and adds an extra income source for the blog that does not even involve any efforts of a sales team. Can you imagine how many startups will want to be featured on all the pages of TechCrunch for a few minutes and a small fee?

Full disclosure: as mentioned above, SmsCoin is currently Profy sponsor.