[JOURNEY] My SMS Marketing Journey + Introduction (+AMA?)

Hello BHW,

Firstly, I would like to introduce myself. My name is _BlackFish, and I'm a huge time lurker. The past few years I've been very heavily involved in the world of DNMs and the DN in general. Since then, I've moved away from pure (super) black hat stuff, and have moved towards more gray hat ways of making money.

The past year has been pretty profitable for me in respect to running ad campaigns on Microsoft, and YouTube. Those were my rather more white hat endeavors, though admittedly, nowhere as near profitable as going pure black hat as it were during the hay years of my career on the DN. But I digress.

Of course in the spirit of chasing higher ROIs, us marketers and entrepreneurs constantly must "experiment" with different options, which is why I started dabbling in SMS marketing few months ago.

Drawing from my experience in OPSec, I ran an anonymous test CPA (SPAM) campaign using mainstream SMS services. I had to shut that down simply because I realized how expensive it would be, and after running the numbers, I saw no convincing contrast between the expenses of running SMS campaigns through mainstream services vs. running Microsoft and YouTube ads. Simply put, I wanted very large discrepancies in my SMS marketing ROI in comparison.

Which has now led me to set up my own GSM pool.

Inspired by this https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/detailed-journey-sms-sending-lead-generation.1235323/#post-13249323 and this https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/ama-sms-marketing-robocalling.1192377/, I decided to get my own GSM gateway. It's a 16-port SIM bank, which is more than what I need for my initial test campaign, but I was fortunate to get a good deal on it. Besides being a 16-port SIM bank, the GSM gateway supports IMEI change on the fly. This will come handy when staying under the radar, and also circumventing around operator blocks.

As advised in the AMA linked above, since I will be running my bulk SMS campaign in the US, I will be running it auto-responder style. My offers will be lead-gen CPAs in the personal loans' niche. I will also be cycling through about 15 different domains. I've personally written a script to support this.

So far, my total investment in the setup has been $700; this is including the GSM pool, and the SIMs en-bulk I've purchased. I estimate my operating cost will be between $20-$30 per day.

As far as my list is concerned, I have access to over a million NA mobile numbers, however, these are all non-targeted. This is why I've chosen the personal loan niche as this has very broad appeal. Again, I'll be running this auto-responder style.

In terms of OPSec, I've taken every precaution as I can to separate myself from the operation. Almost nothing is centralized. Also, I've created a script that'll run all the numbers through an online landing page where the bot will "opt-in" the numbers to receive marketing messages. Finally, I've created my own link shortening script that hides and cloaks affiliate links.

So crossing fingers my experiment goes well. I will answer (almost) all questions pertaining to my journey and keep updating this thread.

Again, my name is _BlackFish, and I'm glad to finally meet you all.

Thanks.

Sounds pretty interesting, any update?

Looks really cool - be really interested to see the next update.

I want to find a low-cost way to have multiple dedicated numbers for PVA on Insta.

EloquentGentleman said:

Sounds pretty interesting, any update?

Click to expand...

Thank you for showing interest in my journey.

I didn't think anyone was really interested, so I've been away from here for a little while, but I do have updates to share.

In my initial test, I sent out my offer to a list of 1,000 targeted leads. These leads were all fresh & exclusive, and I purchased these leads from a hacker. I paid a very steep price for this, but as I learned, this investment was very well worth it. The entire list I purchased, contains over 300K leads.

My daily spend actually turned out to be higher than I expected, simply because prior to, I didn't calculate the activation fee. Thankfully I had the budget to cover this, but the activation fee for each SIM incurred an additional $200 in operating expense.

Additionally, I also hired another hacker contact of mine, to make me a script that would act as an in-house smart-link. This cost me a little over $2,000.

Fortunately for me, the offer I chose was a very high paying offer, and as I said my leads were all ultra targeted, and so from my initial test, I made well over $10K, from my test list of 1,000. With all the expenses, and investments thus far combined, my ROI is about 500%

Now, it's time to scale.

I've been consulting with few spammer buddies of mine, and they've given me ideas to stay hidden further, as far as my OPSec is concerned, so I'm working on improving that as well.

I'll also try my hands on other offers, but this also means hunting down new sources to dump leads from, so I'll probably hold on from doing this until a later time.

Thank you again, for showing interest in this thread. I'll try to be more consistent with my updates.

Very interesting, Blackfish. I have a friend who did something similar, and made very good $.

Questions for you because I am very interested!:

1. how exactly are you separating yourself from the operation?
2. where can you buy a list of leads? How much does a 300k list cost? how did you vet the list to ensure it wasn't garbage before you bought it?
3. Is there any concern with the CPA affiliate that is paying you out on converted offers?

are you still sending? I am facing large ban issues with my sms

I'm doing about dropshipping, can you send me documents so I can find out about these things?
Getting clients in specific countries.
Scrapping phone numbers depending on the client's niche.
Sending SMS via SIM cards & Grey routes OR installing a RoboCall system depends on the client's needs.

Following

i also boought an 8 port sms gateway and im trying to get it working. but having some issues, can i PM you ?