Haven’t posted to my blog for a while. Too busy making money!

I have just finished the development of a new, very unique, online faxing service. It allows you to pre pay for incoming faxes, without having to pay a monthly fee for your own fax number. It’s really cool. Here’s how it works.

Everyone uses the same toll free number to receive faxes. It’s 877-LETS-FAX. The only thing you have to do is make sure the person faxing you puts your email address somewhere on the fax cover sheet. It can be hand written or typed…whatever.

When the document(s) is faxed to 877-LETS-FAX, the system will sort and forward the fax via email to whoever’s email address is noted on the cover sheet. It arrives as a PDF attachment.

The system keeps track of your prepaid balance and the cost is a flat 25 cents per fax AND 20 cents per page received (remember, this is a toll free call to the sender, too!) Compare this to Kinkos or any other publicly accessible fax machine and you can see how inexpensive and convenient this service is.

If you get a fax and you haven’t deposited any money into your prepaid account or you don’t have enough to cover the incoming fax, you’ll get an email from the service telling you that you need to add money to your account in order to receive the incoming fax. You can also check your balance anytime you want by clicking on the "Balance" link on the front page of the site. 

This system isn’t for everyone, of course. You can get a toll free number that can be used to call you AND act as a 24 hour fax line as well, for as little as $2 a month plus per minute usage charges. Many people would do that before using LetsFax.net. But for those that don’t want any monthly financial commitment and only receive 3 or 4 faxes a year, or less, LetsFax.net is a great deal.

It’s also a great way for businesses to be able to fax something to a customer without the customer having to figure out how to gain access to a fax, since they can use one prepaid account to fax something to a multitude of customers over time. The customer just receives the fax as an attachment to their email. Nice and simple. Customer doesn’t have to do anything.

It also allows you to use your fax machine as a scanner to scan documents into a PDF format. Just fax it to 877-LETS-FAX and have your own email address on the cover sheet and it’ll show up in your email as a PDF attachment.

Again, this isn’t for everyone. But it’s a good little niche’ product for those that need it.

Update to this post below.

I just recently came across a very cool calling card that entrepreneurs like me could definitely use. In my example, I have several businesses, all of which have their own toll free numbers so I can know what business is being called before answering the phone. Each has their own voicemail…etc. I use this toll free phone service. You can choose your own vanity toll free number and each can have their own voicemail. Among so many other options. I even have all my calls recorded so I can take an order while I’m on the golf course and then when I get back to the office, listen to the call again and transcribe the call.

My problem is when I call a customer back, their caller ID sees my cell or home phone (whatever phone I’m using to call them back on) instead of my toll free number associated with that particular business. With this very unique calling card, I can choose what number they see on their caller ID. That way, if they use the number on their caller ID to call me back, I will be able to answer the right way, enabling me to answer with the name of the business…etc. If I call back a customer on my home phone, which I do a LOT, they could be calling me back on that phone number and my wife could be answering and just saying "Hello"…etc. This way, I keep all my businesses and customers on the right lines and I don’t have to worry about mixing things up.

It also allows you to choose a female voice for your listener to hear when you talk, disguising your voice. (Or a male voice, if you are a female.) I have no use for that, but it is a COVERT calling card, so I guess that’s one of the covert features. It also will record your call for later playback, if you wish.

Anyway, check it out if you have multiple businesses, or just a need to disguise the number you are calling from. It’s a pretty nifty thing to have around when you need it. (Oh, and they have an affiliate program! This could be a door to door sales item, easily!)

Update June 2007

There’s a better way to mask your outgoing phone number than covert call, mentioned above, now. The best way to make a call to someone now, and have their caller ID show a different number than the phone you’re actually calling from, is to get a toll free number (for your business, of course) from this service and then do the following. When you want to call someone and have your toll free number show up on the caller ID of the party you’re calling, dial the following: 18004889999 then dial your toll free number without the "1". So, if your toll free number is 888-555-5555, then dial that. Then enter your PIN. Then dial 5 and then the number you are calling.

To make it easier, I have the following put into a speed dial on my phone. The "P"s are hardcoded pauses that most address books allow you to use when inputting speed dialed numbers. The "X"s should be your own toll free number and the "pin" is your 4 digit PIN that you have set up in your toll free number service control panel.

18004889999PPXXXXXXXXXXPpinPPP5

After the "5" at the end you enter the number you are calling. One thing nice about this service is you can dial ** at the end of your conversation and then just dial another number without having to hang up and do the whole thing over again. So, you can group your call backs in one session and save some time. 

Update: Here’s our press release.

Here’s a really cool marketing/office/home product. They’re called Genius Pads and are finally available in the US. Basically, they’re huge sticky notes that measure about 1 foot by 1 foot. I can’t tell you how many uses I can think of for this product. I’ll be writing about some as time goes on.

Oh, and I forgot to mention… I’m the one selling them. Yep, that’s my site at megasticky.com. I saw this product about 6 months ago somewhere on a blog. I went to the site selling them and realized they were ONLY available in the UK. I paid $65 to have a pad of 300 shipped to me here in the US.

Spotting an opportunity, I arranged to be the US distributor for the product with the original manufacturers, and viola! MegaSticky.com was born.

Spot an opportunity, formulate a plan and implement. It’s called Entrepreneurialism.

More about uses for this product as time goes on. Watch this space!!  :-) 

I’ve moaned and groaned about inkjet ink costs before. But I’ve finally found a printing solution that doesn’t require me to spend my daughter’s college fund on ink.

I have a specific reason for trying to find a cheaper alternative for in home printing. Not only to print my collectible company’s catalog, but also to offer printing services for my Sticky123 business. I’ve just completed my printing set up. So, I’ll soon be updating the Sticky123 site to offer custom full color printing onto individual 3″ x 3″ Post-It notes, for as little as 9 cents per sticky, complete.

There’s another reason (and a bigger reason) for my wanting to find a cheaper printing method, but I can’t quite share that idea with you yet. I’ve alluded to it before, but I will say that this idea is going to revolutionize the delivery of online information to the offline audience.

Anyway, I want to show you what I did to bring down my printing costs. I purchased a Canon i9900, large format inkjet printer. It can print borderless images on 13″ x 19″ paper. It’s perfect for my 11″ x 17″ catalog that I print for Great American Collectibles. Even thought it uses 8 cartridges, each is still about $12 a cartridge which can really add up. If you calculate the cost per gallon of ink, it’s about $3000 per gallon. That’s just absolutely incredible if you think about it. That’s not half as bad as some inkjet printers. Some can be as high as $8000 a gallon. Yowza!!!! It’s so bad, Congress should be doing hearings and locking people up for this travesty.

But I digress.

I found a bulk ink system that is built for some Epson and Canon printers, from Media Street. They sell a system called “Niagara III Continuous Ink Flow System.” Using this system, you never have to remove the ink cartridges and the ink costs are as low as $200 per gallon. You do the comparison. OEM cartridges are $3000 per gallon. Niagara III is $200 a gallon. Talk about a savings!!!!

Although I’m glad I bought this bulk ink system, I do have to say that it was a harrowing experience to install it. I got ink all over my hands and I said cuss words that I haven’t said since I was in the military. Very, very, frustrating. However, with that said, after all the kinks have been worked out, I’ve been using the printer now for a few days. (Hundreds of prints later!) I’m extremely happy with it. The colors are just as vibrant as they were with the OEM inks and not one ink delivery problem with the tubes… etc.

Here are some pictures of the system after I’ve installed it. Notice the 8 tubes going into the printer from where the bulk ink bottles are located at the right of the printer as you look at in the picture (below.) They thread underneath the lid (lid is slightly ajar to accommodate the tubes.)

Below is a close-up of the bulk ink bottle tray where the ink bottles reside.

Below is the ink bottle container with the lid up so you can see inside. These are essentially 4 ounce bottles. But you can buy each ink color in 32 ounce bottles.

Before using this system, the catalog you see being printed in the first picture used to cost me about .60 cents per catalog for a 2 sided, full color print on a 11" x 17" sheet of paper. Now my ink costs are about 4 cents, give or take a fraction of a cent.

Now think about what you can do in the print world with full color printing at that price.

Update 6-16-05: The service written about below is no longer functional. I’ve stopped the service for lack of time to devote to it. Instead, check out Payloadz. They are a great service for hosting ebooks and it’s tightly integrated with PayPal.
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I’ve been trying to hold this as long as possible, but I just can’t be silent any longer. Even though we’re still a few days from beta launching, I just can’t hold back my excitement on this new web service that I’ve been working on now for the past 6 months or so.

Essentially, I’ve built an online ebook hosting service. It’s at OrderDept.com in case you want to check it out. Note however, that we’re not quite live and there are a few more things that need to be added to the site (like pricing and FAQ) before it’ll be ready for prime time.

This service is going to be very unique. If you have an ebook (or just content you want people to pay to read) OrderDept.com will allow you to host it and automate delivery by accepting payment (using your business PayPal account as your merchant account.)

But that is the simple stuff. What differentiates us is our hardcopy fulfillment service. We give you the ability to have a hardcopy (full color printout) of the ebook sent to your customer automatically when they purchase your ebook. This is only an option, but one that will increase your sales dramatically since many people don’t buy ebooks because of the need to sit and read the content on the computer screen or wait for seemingly forever to print it out.

We’ll actually print your ebook for your customer and send it to them. So, they not only receive immediate access to your ebook through our secure delivery system, but they can also get a full color printout of the ebook sent to them as well. This will NOT be a traditional book. It’ll essentially be your ebook printed out in booklet format. Whatever is on the first page of your ebook will be on the cover of your printout… etc. We’ve been testing this method of selling content and it’s been a big success. People don’t necessarily want the full blown traditionally published and printed book. All they want is the content and an easy way to read it, in most cases. My trials have yielded an average unit sales increase of 120% over ebooks sold without the printout option.

Whether your customer has the option to order the printout is totally up to you, the author. If you WANT to limit your sales by just offering the ebook only, that’s up to you. But at least you have an option now. You can offer the ebook only for one price and then give your customer the option of adding a printout to be sent to them for a few extra bucks. Or you can just package it together and give it to them whether they ask for it or not. It’s totally up to you.

The price of our printout option will be based on the weight of your ebook when printed out on 20 lb laser paper. For example, our test ebook contains about 78 pages when printed in booklet format and it weighs 3 ounces. If this was your ebook, tentative cost to print and ship it to your customer would ABOUT $2.50. (If you have lots of color, this may vary, but it gives you an idea.)

Wait… there’s MORE. No more compatibility issues and download headaches. Your ebook is hosted on our server and password protected. They read it online. With the spread of broadband and “always on” internet connections, this isn’t as much a problem now-a-days as it used to be. Then again, if it IS a problem, they have a printout of the ebook coming in the mail anyway.

The online hosting of the content also allows you to update the content without worrying about outdated copies floating around. And your customer can’t as easily share the info with others like they can a PDF file or other downloadable formats.

There’s even more.

I’ve designed this service to secure your content while at the same time be able to utilize Google’s Adsense program to place ads on your content pages. That way you can continue to earn money on your content even after your customer has paid for it. This is particularly nice when you don’t necessarily want to put adsense ads on your main site because you don’t want your visitors leaving your site when they click on the adsense links. When you place adsense on your ebook pages, you don’t care if they leave because they’ve already paid to read your content. If you have high value keywords in your content, you could earn as much money using adsense in your ebook as you earn selling your ebook.

Guess what? There’s even more.

There’s a built-in tracking system that allows you to track your advertising. But it’s SO much easier to use than other tracking systems. Essentially, all you need to do is tack on “/ad/xyz” to the end of your URL when assigning URLs to your ads. The “xyz” being a variable. You can make that part anything you want. For instance, if you are advertising on Findwhat.com for the keyword “munchkins” then you can use the URL http://www.mydomain.com/ad/fw-munchkins

At the end of the month, we sent you a spreadsheet that will list all your sales and each will be related to your code if you used one to bring that customer to your site before making the purchase. This gives you the ability to track your advertising in your own system since our spreadsheet is a .csv file and very easy to use with any database system you might be using.

This system is designed to be used with a business PayPal account. In case you didn’t know, you can now accept all the major credit cards through PayPal without making the customer become a PayPal member. It’s a great deal because you get immediate access to the money instead of having to wait for the bank to give it to you using traditional merchant accounts. Not to mention the silly monthly fees merchant accounts usually charge.

Haven’t finalized the pricing yet, but it’s going to be dirt cheap. Under $10 a month for the hosting plus your ebook printout costs which is variable depending on how many you sell throughout the month.

I’ll post another update once we are officially up and running. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear any comments or suggestions you might have regarding my new service. Thanks in advance.

Keep thinking!

I don’t know what I’d do without my toll free phone service. I have 6 toll free phone numbers all accessible via an online webpage. The service I use allows me to create marketing campaigns and track them geographically. I can change the ring-to numbers in real time and I can block calls from certain parts of the country. I can block calls coming from pay phones. There’s a ton of features that brought me to this particular company.

But one of the biggest reasons I use them is because you get to choose from a huge list of toll free numbers to use. You can get repeaters like this one 1-877-670-9292 for only $5 setup fee and $5 a month plus usage charges (which is 6.9 cents a minute.) Or if you need something even more memorable, you can choose from a list of vanity numbers like this one 1-888-5-CAREER for $25 setup fee and $25 a month. You can even get an original 800 number like this one 1-800-999-2911 for $500 a month. Not sure why someone would put such a premium on having an actual “800″ number, but I guess some think it’s that important. But if you want to get off really cheap, they have regular numbers for $2 a month, like 1-888-894-0806.

Getting to choose your own number from 100s of numbers is really nice, but this is where the service is valuable for us entrepreneurs. What’s the first thing besides a website that we need for a new business? A phone number. But if you have 3 businesses going on at the same time, how do you share your phone with all three and still seem credible in your customer’s eyes? With the service I use, I can have all of them ring to my cell phone and when the call comes in, my cell phone will display which of my toll free numbers the caller is calling. That way, if I want to answer it, I can answer it with the right company name. But if I don’t want to answer it, I’ve set it up so that it’ll go to its own voicemail instead of waiting for my cell phone’s voicemail to pick it up. That way, I can have the option of answering all my business’ calls from one location, but if I can’t answer, each has it’s own voicemail, customized to that particular business.

It’s a life saver and it only cost me (at the minimum) $2 a month, per number, plus usage of 6.9 cents per minute.

You can’t beat that with a stick. I love the fact that there isn’t a monthly service fee to use all the features, like voicemail and all that. If you look at all the features it has, there’s not one service out there that can compete with it price wise.

One more nifty feature… it’ll deliver my voicemails to me via email. So, I never have to call into the voicemail box to retrieve my messages if I don’t want to. Sweet.

Check it out when you get a chance.