ePOWER TIP: (full story)
Save
Hundreds Of Dollars When Contacting Overseas
Clients By Phone ...
When you work with clients that are moving here
from other countries, there is a time when it
would be helpful (and impressive) to go beyond
e-mail and pick up the phone --if it weren't so
darn expensive. Well, not any more! Here's the
secret I discovered to making those calls to
anywhere for just pennies a minute!
As you know, I speak all over
the world. This means lots of contracts to be
negotiated and doing that strictly by e-mail
leaves something to be desired. Yet international
long-distance phone conversations can end up being
rather costly. The good news is that I stumbled
upon a solution that allows me to make real phone
calls from any phone (no, not the computer kind)
to just about any location in the world for a
fraction of what it normally would cost.
Thanks to the folks at
Net2Phone.com you can make phone-to-phone
calls overseas for just pennies a minute. This is
the way it works: When you make the call through a
special access number, the conversation is
converted to "voice over IP" (essentially an
Internet transmission) until it reaches a computer
near a phone exchange in the country you are
calling. From there it converts back to a standard
analog phone call for the person on the other
side. By circumventing the other country's
international phone exchange (think of it as a way
of "slipping under the fence"), Net2Phone.com is
able to save you a bundle every calling minute.
The sound quality is actually quite good, though
there is a bit of a delay as you might expect,
similar to a call being transmitted via satellite.
Net2Phone has two basic
calling card plans, and the one you choose will
depend upon your needs and "style". For example, a
call to Australia from the US using the standard
Net2Phone Direct Calling Card will cost about 7.9
cents / minute with no connect charge. However,
they have another plan called "PennyTalk" (which
can only be found at
getpennytalk.com) where that same call costs
only 4 cents / minute but with a $.49 charge per
connection. Since my staff and I tend to be a bit
long winded and typically spend more than 10
minutes on a call, this is the plan we use.
Also,
at the time of this writing, you can start your PennyTalk account with just $15
USD, while the standard Net2Phone card
requires a minimum of $25 USD. Every time you
place a call, their system will tell you how many
minutes you have left in your account. Just prior
to speaking to a client in Sydney, (with only $7
left in my PennyTalk account), the system reminded
me that I had over 150 minutes of talk time left
—imagine that!
Now you don't have an excuse
to not make those international calls that could
make a huge difference in your business. However,
this new knowledge is useless if you don't sign up
for one of the two programs mentioned above —so
take action and do it NOW! (if you haven't guessed
by now, "ACTION" is the theme of this month's
issue...)
|
