If you’ve been marketing on the internet or even had a website for your business for any length of time at all, it is highly likely that you are smartly gathering names and email addresses from your website visitors. You probably send out an e-zine and/or email your list with some regularity. But have you started building a text message list yet?

That’s right. It’s time to start building a list of people with whom you can communicate by text message. If you do it now you will be among the first to do so and will reap the rewards of jumping in early. (Remember how the first folks to build massive email lists cashed in with their list? You can do that now with text messaging.)

In case you are thinking that text messaging is a fad or something that only teenagers do – did you know that more people worldwide use text messaging than use email? What about the fact that 80% of the US population has a cell phone and virtually all of them are text message capable? In fact, 75 Billion text messages are sent in the US alone each month.

Oh, and wrap your head around this one – text messages are known to have an open rate in the high 90% range.

Just like when you first started your email list there are some basics you need to know and one very important step that will make sure you are successful.

Here’s what you need to know:

Text Messaging is an Opt-In Process

First, as my colleague Chris Torbit from Blast Companies always says, “Everybody starts at zero.” There are no lists of cell phone numbers you can buy to just get started sending out messages. Text messaging is a mandatory, no-exceptions-allowed-period, OPT IN process. If you are going to send a text message to someone, they must initiate the relationship by opting in.

There are two ways that people can opt in to your text message list. One, they can use their cell phone to text in your keyword to your short code or two, they can sign up online through a fill in the blank sign up form similar to the one you probably use for your email list.

They key to building a successful list is offering something of such compelling value that they will want to sign up to get text messages from you. (More about this in a minute.)

You Need a Text Messaging Company

Much the same as you don’t manually email your customers through your personal email account, you won’t do the same with text messaging. You’ll use the equivalent of an Aweber or Constant Contact service that will handle it all for you. These are text message companies.

While you can lease your own short code it is very expensive ($500-$1000 per month with a 3 month minimum) and untimely (it takes 6-8 weeks to get your campaigns approved by the cell phone carriers). I suggest finding a shared short code vendor.

A few I can recommend are Mobivity, i2SMS, Clickatell and mobileStorm. They have a wide variety of services and prices, so you will probably want to look into each of them before selecting one.

What to Send to Your List

You may be thinking that you don’t know what you could possibly send via text message to a list of your prospects, customers or subscribers. After all, there are only 160 characters you can use. But the reality is there are lots of things you can send. Here are some ideas:

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Reminders of upcoming events, teleseminars, workshops, deadlines, price increases or even reminders to read your blog posts.

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Short tidbits of useful information. Think of this as sending out a single bullet point at a time.

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Coupons or sales. You could have a special short notice sale or price decrease that only your text message list members will know about.

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Voting / Polling. With two-way text messaging you have the ability to ask your list to vote on a poll and you’ll get the response instantly.

You will want to stay focused on providing excellent value to people when using text messaging. After all, you are communicating with them on the most personal media device we’ve ever known. There is a lot of room for error and ticking people off. Be very aware of offering and providing solid VALUE to your list. (Here are some posts I’ve written about providing value via mobile marketing.)

Critical Action Step for your Text Message List Building

The key here is action. If you are going to be ahead of the curve with this, you need to get going. Once the word is out everyone will start building text message lists and it will get harder and harder to get people to sign up. You want them on YOUR list first. Don’t wait on this one. Trust me, get started now.

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Since I’ve always liked when people practice what they preach, here is how to sign up for my text message list.

Also, I’m offering a Two-Hour TeleSeminar Workshop on Wednesday, September 24th called How to Build Your Text Messaging List: 3 Steps to Get Started Today. Find out more about that here.