Saving money in today’s economy can start in the most obvious places, your phone bill.  Technology advances over the years has made making calls very affordable, but don’t think the phone company’s are just going to lay back and give away their services for free.  So before you choose to switch over your phone lines to a Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) provider, make sure you know the benefits and the disadvantages of the service.

Dating back a couple of years ago I had actually used Vonage to call my friends and family as opposed to having a regular phone line.  VOIP services depends on two main factors, your internet speed and the quality of the lines that the VOIP provider uses.   I was happy with the savings and the line quality but when the internet went down, so did my phone.

Well, recently I decided to give Vonage another chance because of the amount of international calls I was making.  Calling to Bahamas at .03 per minute was costing me around $150 a month just in international calls alone.  With vonage they now include Bahamas in their Free Unlimited Calls Around the World Package, which I thought was an awesome deal.  They advertise the package for $24.99 with free hardware to connect the phone to your internet and with taxes and everything my total bill for the month will be around $34.00.

I ordered the service online and after 3 days I received my Vonage box and instructions.  It took no more than 3 minutes to connect it to my internet and start placing calls.  One problem I had was the connection to Bahamas, it was horrible.  Sometimes it went through, sometimes it didn’t.  So I called Vonage customer service and within 2 days they had solved the problem.

Another benefit is their voice mail service.  They TRY to take your voice mail message and transcribe it to text and email it to you, so you don’t have to call your voice mail to check messages.  With that being said, I advice you to check your messages, because it doesn’t transcribe very well as you will see in this example.

There are small business and residential plans with many types of features.  So before, you decide in going the route of VOIP, check more vonage reviews to see what is important to you and what you can live without in terms of service and quality.  If you aren’t in money savings mode and your lively hood depends on having a 100% clear and available phone line, you might want to keep your old school phone service til the VOIP providers iron out their kinks.

Having a great hosting account is very under rated in terms of having a successful website.  Although having great content, SEO factors, traffic, great domain names, and other factors play their part, nothing is worse than having all those parts working and your website is loading slow or you just found out your hosting company is updating their servers and all of your sites will be down for a couple of hours if not days.

To date, I have 3 hosting accounts. One of those accounts is used primarily to host my my proxy network which is hosted at TMZ Hosting. They were awesome, until they decided they wanted to upgrade their servers, which would be a good thing to new subscribers to the service. But to others like myself, who have over 50 sites hosted with them, it can be a huge headache changing out the DNS for the new ones. Now, it is my fault for not changing them all at the allocated time because my traffic is all but gone now. But all in all TMZ is awesome for proxy networks.

Bluehost.com is okay for now. They are horrible in customer relations but great in customer service. I had a couple of sites which were hacked into while I was on vacation and instead of notifying me via email, they just shut my sites down. No phone calls, emails, IM, nothing. But, after calling customer service they easily showed me what occurred and how to proceed in getting the sites running again. On the other hand, they are good for Wordpress blogs, being that you don’t have to manually go into the hosting account and change out the .htaccess file when updating your permalinks, I had issues with other hosting companies with that. Lastly, Bluehost.com only allows 50 sql databases, so if you a fan of wordpress blogs, you will be limited to 50 sites.

And to the worst hosting companies that I have dealt with so far, Cirtex hosting. Not only are they horrible for wordpress blogs, they are horrible for video sites as well. I started with Cirtex because they were recommended as a host that will allow adult material and has great speeds for videos, boy was they wrong! First, let’s talk about using Cirtex for Wordpress blogs, the sites load very slow and you have to manually go into the hosting account to find the .htaccess files to change your permalinks if your into the SEO thing. Next, try setting up your email accounts with their service. They make it so difficult. I usually like to keep the same password for all of my email addresses, just to keep organized and sane at the same time. But, with Cirtex they won’t allow you to have a simple password, it must have one Capital letter and a special character like !@ or a number in order for it to be accepted.

Soon, I will be taking all of my account and merging them with Hostgator.com.  I have heard great reviews and want to give them a try as soon as my cirtex account expires.

As most small business owners have realized, wearing many hats to work is a normal reality.  There is rarely time enough to check email, analyze your web stats, keep abreast of what your competitors are doing (much less staying two steps ahead) and taking time out for a bite to eat.   Being able to market your services/product/information and finding the right mix between time, money, and energy spent on certain projects can become a nightmare if you don’t have the right software to manage these tasks.

This is where Customer Relationship Management software earns its fame, by helping business owners harness the power of automation.  Sales and Marketing is a process of fine tuning a system til it can be repeated in a fashion that an owner can concentrate on developing long term clients and squeezing every little profit out of every sale.

A company called Infusionsoft has a great system that allows a small business owner to automate follow ups, manage contacts, online lead capturing, selling product online, collecting cash, and tracking sales, all from one system.  Gone are the days where using a basic auto responder can get you buy.  Being able to properly manage a hot lead into a long term client and more importantly where did that client come from is the power of Infusionsoft’s small business CRM software.

Click Here for a Free  15-day Trial

Infusionsoft is web-based software that combines CRM, email marketing, and ecommerce into one system. But the real magic is their automatic follow-up engine, because it finally makes it easy for entrepreneurs to achieve amazing follow-up. When this happens, more prospects become customers…and sales explode. That’s why its recommended as the only software company that guarantees to double your sales.

I guess for a limited time only they are giving away a free ebook entitled The Edge of Success.  So no need to search the web for the edge of success ebook torrent, the book can be downloaded for free.

CLICK HERE