Hosted Social Commerce Apps For Facebook

Just as e-commerce has become an established and accepted channel for business and shopping, the next wave of technology washes ashore. This is social commerce, an adjunct to and potentially more popular way to conduct business online. Social commerce is an outgrowth of social media, especially using the two most popular platforms, Facebook and Twitter. If social media is where people want to spend their time online, then social media is where you have to go to find customers.

The big challenge is how to you leverage the power of social media? You can flail around trying different approaches. Perhaps you can build a website, launch an e-mail campaign or write a blog. All of these do-it-yourself approaches are now old school as far as the Web is concerned. You won’t be need to be learning new software on your PC or deploying more of your own servers. What you need to be working with are hosted solutions. Facebook itself is a hosted solution, although it should be considered just the basic platform for your social commerce efforts. To get the social performance you are after, you’ll want to add some advanced apps to your Facebook page.

What sort of apps are we talking about? How about apps that give you the ability to create deal shares, fan offers, fund raising donations, viral messaging, photo showcases, RSS feeds, add Twitter feeds, recruit volunteers and so on. Can you build these apps yourself and have them work flawlessly on your Facebook page? Can you even find these functions here and there around the Web? Even if you could, they’ll never have a consistent look and feel.

What you need is an “app buffet” from North Social. The apps are part of a large collection that you choose from to power your Facebook page. Each app has its own content management system. You set preferences, upload images, links and text. No need to learn or write any code.

What kind of results can you get with the North Social app collection power your Facebook page? Here’s an example to give you an idea what’s possible:



Anxious to give this a try? You should know that every account comes with a 14 day free trial. Accounts range from starter to enterprise level. All of the apps are unlocked and ready to use for every account? What differentiates the account levels? It’s based on the number of fans you have. The starter account has a limit of 1,000 fans. The professional account moves that limit up to 50,000. The Enterprise account has unlimited fans and up to 5 Facebook pages. All other accounts are for a single page only, although you can always sign up for more accounts if you need them.

The future of social commerce is already here. Learn more, watch demo videos on each of the apps, and then pick the account appropriate for the size (and social popularity) of your business and start your 14 day free trial.

Where to Get a 1-800 Number Cheap

Looking to have your own 1-800 number but don't want to spend a lot of money? No need to. How's $5 sound?

Yes, you can get an 800 inbound toll free number for just five bucks. It will also cost you a mere $5 a month to maintain your use of the number and 6.9 cents a minute for the calls you receive. For most business users, that's a pittance.
But it's a pittance that can pay off big.

Here's why. Anyone who calls your 1-800 number is doing so because they saw it in an ad, on a business card, on a flyer, in the newspaper, on TV, on a billboard, or heard it on the radio. Anyone who is motivated to call that number has a serious reason for doing so. Usually that translates into a motivated customer.

Most business owners know that 1-800 numbers have a powerful attraction for new and existing customers alike. People just have an aversion to paying long distance charges to call a business. It's something like paying shipping costs. The actual cost involved may not be that much, but it's a big turn-off compared to free.

What many business owners assume is that a 1-800 number is going to cost them a fortune to buy and use. That may go back to 10 or 20 years ago when the phone company was the only source for toll free service. The perceived value was high and so was the price tag.

No more. Now there are competitive toll free service providers who've made it possible for anyone, even the smallest independent professionals or entrepreneurs, to have at least one toll free number.

Is $5 a month too much? OK, then how about $2? Yes, you can get an 866, 877 or 888 toll free number for just $2 a month to order and $2 a month to maintain. The same 6.9 cents per minute applies for calls coming in from the contiguous states. It's a little more from Alaska and Hawaii.

This is why I said at least one toll free number. At $2 a pop, many companies have a bunch of toll free numbers. There is one for catalog orders, another for customer service, another for specials running on TV, another for items featured in the newspaper, and so on. The more numbers you have, the more finely you can track your marketing efforts. With a separate number for each ad you'll know exactly what is pulling and what isn't.

The service I'm recommending, Kall8, makes it easy to track these ad campaigns. In addition to assigning you a number, you'll get an online control panel to determine how your number is assigned and track any and all calls coming in. You'll have a complete accounting report for each of your numbers that you can check from any Internet enabled computer. Take a lunch break at your favorite restaurant offering free WiFi and see how your ads are doing.

You can also pick up your voice mail from these numbers if you wish. If you don't have the luxury of having someone to take calls, you can have your incoming toll free calls go to voice mail when you aren't available. If you want, audio clips of those calls will be sent to your email at no extra charge. Any incoming fax messages will also go to your email. This way your office is wherever you happen to be. "Another latte, please. My toll free numbers are paying off big today!"

Add a Toll Free Number For Next to Nothing

You'd like to expand your business phone features, but upgrades can be expensive. Here's a way you can add an inbound toll free number to whatever telephone service you have now, including your cell phone, for just a couple of bucks a month.

Toll free numbers offer a big advantage for nearly any business that publishes a phone number. Within a very localized calling area, customers can call your local number without getting charged. But even a few miles away, that call will be considered local long distance and they'll get dinged a higher rate. Across the border in the next state, prospective customers may really hesitate to make that long distance call.

But give them a toll free number and they'll gladly call you from wherever they happen to be. After all, with an inbound toll free number you pay the cost of the call. It's free to the caller. So much do callers hate to pay long distance charges that toll free numbers are expected for sales and customer service lines. Otherwise, your business may not be taken seriously.

What they don't know is that you're paying next to nothing to have that number available and a very small per minute fee for the calls that come in. Toll free numbers start at just $2 to register and $2 a month to maintain. That's within the budget of any size business and even contract professionals. If and only if you receive a call on your toll free number, you pay just 6.9 cents per minute for calls that originate within the contiguous 48 states and slightly more elsewhere. The only people who will call this number are serious customers and prospects, so it's the most cost effective 6.9 cents a minute you can possibly spend.

But there's a lot more. With Kall8 Toll Free Service your toll free number comes bundled with a wealth of handy features. You get voice mail, call blocking, caller ID, call forwarding and conference calling. Those are typical phone service features. But Kall8 also gives you the ability to program the number you want your toll free calls to ring to. Set it to your office phone, home phone or cell phone. The caller has no idea where you are. They are just calling the toll free number. Mobile professionals will change the ring-to number during the course of the day, so they never miss a call.

Speaking of mobile professionals, Kall8 includes a couple of service that make it easy to maintain an office from your laptop computer. Your toll free number doubles as a fax number. Someone can simply send a fax to your toll free number and it will be sent to you as an email attachment. The same is true for voice mail. You can have your voice mails sent as sound files attached to emails so you can listen to them on your computer wherever you happen to be.

Pretty fancy for $2 a month, right? There's more too, including detailed call reports that you can view in your online control panel. This service is so versatile that marketing companies will buy up a bunch of toll free numbers so they can track the response from each ad they run separately. After all, at this price toll free numbers are one cheap business tool.

My Store is Solid, Solid Like a Cactus

You want to port your retail business to the Web or start an online business selling products you know will fly off the shelves. So, what do you do? Rent office space and start interviewing programmers? Take the cheap-charley approach and build your own site using bargain software you found at the office supply store? Naw. What you want is a Yahoo! Store from Solid Cactus.

Solid what? Solid Cactus. That enigmatic name happens to be one of the top 500 fastest growing private companies according to Inc. 500 Magazine. Like Google, they happen to have their own restaurant to serve their 150 employees. It's Saguaro's Cafe. You might get the impression that Solid Cactus is a great business in Arizona. But it's actually been awarded the title of "One of the Best Places to Work in Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania? Go figure.

What Solid Cactus does is build Yahoo! Stores for their clients. They've designed lots of them. More than 3,500 Web sites built to date. Sure, you can go off and build your own store. But why take the hard road when you can get a professional result quickly with help from Solid Cactus.

A Yahoo! Store is an ecommerce platform offered by the same company that is a main player in the field of Internet search. What you get with a Yahoo! Store is a online storefront that can handle anything from a few to a few thousand different products. You get a shopping cart, tax and shipping calculator, gift wrapping options, and the ability to accept payment from credit and debit cards or PayPal. You'll be able to print invoices and shipping labels and use major carriers like UPS, FedEx, and USPS to get the goods to your customers.

Yahoo! Stores are built upon a platform called RTML or Real Time Markup Language. It was designed by Viaweb and later sold to Yahoo! as a means to create Web pages too complex for standard HTML programming. You can learn RTML to customize or modify your store pages, or you can let a developer such as Solid Cactus handle that for you.

Solid Cactus has taken the basic store templates that Yahoo! offers and added additional features. Some of the features you can get are multiple photos of your products on a page, reviews written by your customers, send-page-to-a-friend, display the money saved when buying from your store versus retail, randomly displayed best sellers, mailing list sign-up, randomly displayed testimonials, and LivePerson's live chat and contact center.

There are other enhancements designed to improve search engine optimization so you can be easily found on the Internet. Online marketing as well as website development is a key expertise of Solid Cactus. In fact, the owners of the company got started with their first Internet based store in 1994. That was long before the popular retailers you find online today were doing anything on the Internet.

No Company For Old Ideas

One of most amazing success stories of the last 5 years has been the rise of Telarus, Inc. as a telecommunications marketing powerhouse. For veterans of the telephone and data line industry it may seem like this upstart has come out of nowhere to become a major player overnight. In a field where service options and prices have been slow and measured in their change, how can could this happen?

It's all in the innovation. Well, it's mostly in the innovation. The rest can be attributed to the energy of the two founders, Adam Edwards and Patrick Oborn.

I should mention that I've known both Adam and Patrick as an affiliate of their Shop For T1 program over the last five years. During this time I've been an eye witness to the light-speed change that has taken place in the competitive telecom services field, thanks to Telarus. Before I got involved in the program, marketing T1 lines was largely the purview of the telephone companies and industry veterans who broke out to start their own consulting firms. Then, instantly, businesses users could enter their address and phone number into an online form and get a list of competitive T1 prices in a couple of minutes.

What changed the game was a now patented software tool called GeoQuote (tm). The brains of the system is an online application that hooks-up with carrier databases to calculate line spans and their related lease prices. But the brains behind the brains is Patrick Oborn. A electronics engineer by trade, Patrick cut his Web marketing teeth by building a storefront and agent back office for Cognigen, the forerunner of today's Commission River. His next project, Telarus' Shop For T1 service with its groundbreaking GeoQuote engine, was an order of magnitude more sophisticated. It's still a work in progress. One of the latest features of GeoQuote is mapping out Ethernet service routes by just inputting a business address.

Adam Edwards has complemented Patrick Oborn's skills by being the brains behind the business. Technology, no matter how good, can wither on the vine unless it gets out there in the marketplace and grabs hold before something else moves in. The Telarus business model is unique in its teaming arrangement of lead marketing affiliates, professional sales consultants, carrier channel managers and independent value added resellers, all tied together by an automated infrastructure. It's a system that turns prospective leads coming in by phone or the Internet into customer consultations, service proposals, signed contracts and turned up line services and/or equipment installation. All while making sure nothing slips into the cracks.

This designed-in efficiency has been there from the beginning, and makes it relatively easy to layer on new services such as MPLS networks, wireless point to point, SIP trunking and whatever comes next. This proven model is now being used in an almost recursive way to re-engineer the old Cognigen marketing business into the next generation affiliate marketing company called Commission River. Cognigen was the pride and joy of the late Kevin Anderson, who stunned the consumer and SOHO telecom marketplace with automatic self-replicating storefronts that enabled hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide to make money with their own Internet-enabled businesses.

Commission River is expanding on Kevin's dream with a suite of new tools, training resources, and updated websites that maintain the focus on residential and small business telecommunications. What started as alternative switched long distance is now VoIP, cellular phone, Web hosting, Triple Play TV/Broadband/Phone, and related services.

What hasn't changed is the affiliate opportunity that enables ambitious individuals with a business or technology background to launch their own small businesses. It's just expanded into a wider range of technology offerings, even including the high commission business services sold by Telarus.

The last generation has been known as the era of Gates and Jobs. Could the next generation be known for Edwards and Oborn?

Tell Me You're Not PAYING For Equipment Leads

As a solution provider, you're not still paying for equipment leads... are you?

Oh, no. That gets so expensive, and a lot of those leads just fizzle out anyway. Right?

Here's a better idea. Why not get your sales and marketing leads for telephone systems and IT networking equipment on a commission basis. In other words, qualified leads from serious business customers in your area are emailed to you as they come in, at no cost to you. You choose which ones you want to pursue and do your best to make the sale. If and only if you successfully complete the job and are paid by the customer, do you remit a small percentage of the sale back to the agency that provides you with the leads.

That's right. This business model is quite different from any marketing methods you've been using. Other lead sources require you to pay up front for ads or a set of leads, be it a flat fee or on a per lead basis. Online advertising is worse. You pay by the click and a lot of them are just curious individuals, not even actual businesses. With the VAR Network, your leads come to you with no up-front charges. The online database system is targeted to business users with specific current needs, and are screened by service footprint and product line. These are good leads that may be costing you $25 or more now, if you can even get this quality of lead on a regular basis.

Who joins this network? Nearly 2,500 solution providers, including branch office sales people of major telecom equipment partners. Also independent consultants, telephone system installers, and network equipment resellers. The cost to join the network is the same for everyone. Free. You sign up for the VAR Network quickly and easily online. A VAR Network consultant will call you to complete the application and activate your listing within the network. Typically, your information is active in the database within a business day and being matched to warm leads as they come in.

Where do the leads come from? The VAR Network and its independent marketing agents actively pursue potential business customers online, by direct mail, in print advertising, by telephone and in-person. Many requests for equipment and service support come from existing customers who are leasing telecommunication lines through Telarus, which also runs the VAR Network. Because of this relationship, you have immediate access to qualified technical and sales consultants who can provide line services such as T1, PRI, DS3, and Ethernet WAN to your customers. If you refer a line requirement back to the network, you'll share in ongoing monthly commissions if the sale is closed by Telarus. Stop giving away telco line and WAN business to the phone company, when the VAR Network can help you offer a total solution and a share of the income.

The VAR Network is a new and exciting concept in IT and telecom equipment sales leads. It's a business model that is expanding exponentially. Beat your competitors to the punch by augmenting your sales leads with those from the VAR network. Eventually, you may dump all of your paid advertising. This network is that good.

Have a look at the VAR Network and see how it operates. If you like what you see, you'll find the partner sign-up opportunity right there. Or, get more details on how the business opportunity works at the VAR Partner site, designed for resellers only.