Great things that come with this time of year; who doesn’t love watching a football game in a blizzard (other than Raiders fans)? Seriously though, it can be difficult to stay motivated as the seasons change and the days grow shorter, colder and grayer.

Here are five ways to avoid the motivational doldrums brought on by the annual shift of the earth’s axis.

1. Fitness

Try a morning workout regiment. Life is hectic and something always comes up as the day progresses. Trying to exercise in the evening leaves way too much time to come up with an excuse: I didn’t have a good lunch, work was too exhausting, I’ll miss my game/TV show, I’ll just do it tomorrow. If you wake up early, there’s nothing getting in the way except the snooze button. If you’re a snooze addict, we recommend putting the alarm clock out of reach from your bed.

Increasing physical activity will have positive effects on both your body and mind. A morning workout will boost your metabolism for the entire day while giving you those extra endorphins that will keep you happy and productive.

2. Sleep

Similar to exercising, inadequate sleep can lead to fatigue, depression, and a lack of productivity. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults should average between seven and nine hours of sleep per night. It’s important to be consistent with your sleep pattern. Making up for a lack of sleep during the week on the weekend is not a healthy way to get to that average. Exercising earlier in the day will help set your internal body clock and make you drowsy earlier in the evening. Also, try to avoid caffeine in the afternoon.

With the sun set and less activities to do outdoors, there’s a good chance you’ll be spending at least some part of your night looking at a computer screen. Did you know your brain processes light emitted from a computer monitor very similarly to that of natural daylight? This can mess with your internal clock and keep you awake longer. A new program alters the colors displayed on your computer’s monitor to lessen the blow of sun-like light.

3. Goals

Now that physical fitness is covered, it’s time to get motivated. Setting goals and rewarding yourself and your staff is a great way to keep yourself and others excited to get to work. Consider rewarding a top employee with a gift card or treating the whole team to happy hour if certain goals are met. Not only is it a great motivational tool, but it’s also great for employee bonding and increasing trust.

4. Remind Yourself Why

Take a look in the mirror and remember why you got into this business. Try to remember the reasons why you were so passionate then, and apply it to today. Thinking about how your success positively affects your family and even your favorite clients can also be strong motivational influence.

5. Friends

A happy workplace is a productive workplace. Take time to interact with your employees everyday; the more you can get to know your employees, the more they’ll trust you and the more productive they’ll be. Similarly, promote comradery amongst your employees. Perhaps reward an entire department with drinks or dinner for a job well done. Ideally, you would want to go to work because you love what you do and the people you work with. Try to create a community based on productivity, respect and friendship.

Does the end of Daylight Savings Time have any effects on you?

So before you pull out the measuring tape and hammer, here are a few questions to help you create a killer home workspace:

What type of space do you need?

Make a list of everything you’ll need to do for your job. If you will have a lot of paperwork or other tasks that demand extra space, take note of it.

Will you be taking care of a child during work hours?

Your children are more important than your work, but that doesn’t mean they should be interrupting your workflow. Create a fun and safe environment for them that you can monitor while you work.

Do you have a pet?

If you have a pet, the little guy or gal may confuse your working at home for 24/7 playtime. We suggest having the same routine as if you were working outside the home. Take care of all meals and walks before work begins. Shut the door to your workspace for more privacy.

Do you have an extra room?

If you have an extra room in your home, great! If not, don’t worry, you just have to get creative. Find someplace in your home where you can make room for a workspace. This can be a section of your bedroom, living room or even kitchen. (We don’t recommend the bathroom.) You may want to consider purchasing a curtain or room divider to separate your professional and personal spaces.

What are your distractions?

Yes, we suggested the kitchen. If you know you’d be tempted, as I am, by the cookie dough in the fridge, you shouldn’t put your office in the kitchen. Likewise, if you have a window that looks down onto a busy street that often distracts you, move your desk to the adjacent wall so you can still benefit from the natural light but won’t get distracted by the hustle and bustle.

Will you be entertaining in your office?

Your home office should be comfortable first and foremost for you. If you will be entertaining other people though, it must be comfortable and professional for them as well. If you know you will be doing video conferencing, make sure your background appears professional (hide your Flock of Seagulls poster).

Now that you know what your situation is before creating a workspace, let’s look at what the goals of your new home office will be:

Put the office in “home office” first.

Get all the supplies you will need and put them in a special storage container. Don’t use your home phone unless you have a virtual phone system in place. You don’t want your kids accidentally picking up your business calls. Don’t make it so businesslike that it feels sterile. You will still want to have some family photos and soothing artwork.

Your office should match your brand.

Is your company going for “cool and modern?” Then you probably shouldn’t be rocking grandma’s hand-me-down furniture. (Or is that trendy now? It’s hard to keep up.)

Bring nature indoors.

Natural light can make a profound difference for your mood. Try and get your home office by a window, and while you’re there put a plant or two there for fresh oxygen.

A quiet office is a happy office.

Noise pollution can increase stress levels and decrease productivity. Keep your workspace free of unnecessary noise. If you’re a music producer with a home studio, ignore this one.

Reward yourself with upgrades.

Know your spending limits when you create your office. Resist the urge to go over budget. Instead, create a plan where you make upgrades to the office only when you reach certain revenue goals. This will keep your pocketbook in check and provide a little extra motivation.

Do you have or are you planning on using a home office? Leave your tips in the comments section below!

The smaller your business, the more important it is to hire the right person on your first attempt. Making the wrong hire, especially in a small business, will cost your company a lot of time and money. These tips will prevent you from making some common mistakes and land the perfect candidate to help your business grow on the first try.

1. Hire someone who is different than you.

Okay smarty, more than just different DNA. It can be tempting to try and find someone with a similar personality and background, but similarity doesn’t breed innovation. As long as your hire is passionate about success, a different perspective could push your company to the next level.

2. Have a flexible timeline for making the hire.

If the first person you interview is a great fit, don’t wait around wasting time and money interviewing all the other candidates. When you find the right person, make the hire. This works the other way too. If you knew a candidate wouldn’t work out before a hiring deadline, they’re not suddenly going to be the ideal hire because of a deadline. It’s better to leave the position vacant for longer than waste time and money training someone who you’ll have to replace.

3. Sample work.

Not everyone is an extrovert. Depending on the job responsibilities, an interview might be the least important part of the hiring process. Have your candidates perform some sample work during the interview. Is their quality of work up to your standards? With a little training would it be?

4. Background checks.

There are a number of reputable background check services that don’t cost very much money. As a small business owner, you owe it to your employees to make sure everyone is in a safe work environment. You certainly don’t want any surprises down the road.

5. Write a great job posting.

Make your job posting stand out from the clutter of all the other posts on the online job boards. Write about your company as well as the job. What makes your business unique? Remember, candidates aren’t only trying to sell themselves to you, you have to sell your company to them too. What would excite someone to want to work for you? Be honest with your description of the company culture. It wouldn’t be good for morale if your new hire is expecting pool tables and dance breaks but is treated with an unlimited supply of pens from the supply closet instead.

What do you think of our tips? From your experience, what would you add?

Other Tips:
Find the Best Staff With These Valuable Hiring Tips
3 Tips for Hiring Great People

We think having a personal profile is great; there’s no better way to stay connected to family and friends online. For a business though, a fan page has tremendous benefits:

1. Separation of Work and Play: Does your business site link to your personal profile? Be careful, prospective clients probably aren’t interested in seeing photos from last Friday’s happy hour or your old college buddies trash talking about the big game. A fan page can separate your professional and personal lives while protecting each.

2. Landing Page: When a new user visits your profile for the first time, odds are they are landing on your wall. This isn’t the best place to go for someone unfamiliar with who you are and your product. A custom landing page gives you the freedom to introduce your business in any way you want. Get creative with it!

3. Vanity URL Rule Change: Recently Facebook changed their rule about fan pages needing to have a minimum of 25 fans before registering a custom URL. If this was holding you back before, know that you are now free to pursue your snazzy custom Facebook address. This is especially important for your printed marketing materials. Connect with us on Facebook at Facebook.com/FreedomVoiceSystems is a heck of a lot more professional and easier to remember than Facebook.com/page/p23jlajsf8j3.

4. Facebook Insights: How many people are looking at your personal profile? How many times does each one of your updates get viewed? Are you progressing or regressing? Without analytics, there’s no way to measure your Facebook presence. With the Facebook Insights for pages, you can see how many and when people are viewing and interacting with your posts. This is great for discovering what types of content your fans prefer. Maybe you personally feel that kitten pictures are adorable, but your fans can’t stand them. With a fan page, you’ll know.

5. Custom Analytics: The basic Facebook Insights are great for a start, but you can take it to another level by authorizing a third party program like Crowdbooster that gives more detailed data as well as suggestions on when to post your next update based on when your fans are the most active. Maybe you’re on the West Coast but a lot of your fans are on the East Coast. Waking up early or scheduling a post while you’re still sleeping could land bigger results.

6. Contests and Promotions: If you want to do a contest or promotion on Facebook, you have to do it on a Fan Page through the use of a third party app (Facebook Promotions Guidelines). A promotion can be a great way to engage current fans and woo people who are on the fence. Looking for a promotion idea? Here are a few good examples: Facebook Promos.

7. Get Liked and Like Others: Do you work with other businesses? Your company page can like other brands and even tag them in posts expanding your message to new people.

We want to hear how your business is doing and what we can do to make it better. Find us on Facebook and Twitter for all the latest company updates and industry news, small business tips, the latest in technology and social media, and connections with other FreedomVoice customers.

Way back in the Year 2000, the FCC released the 866 toll free number prefix in order to ease the burden on 888, 877, and 800 numbers. Ten years later, with high quality vanity spellings a rare commodity, the FCC finally has stepped up and unleashed a whole new batch of numbers to champion your brand:  the 855 toll free prefix.

What does the release of 855 numbers mean for you and your business? In a word, opportunity.

For an entire decade, valuable vanity toll free number spellings have been locked up by those lucky enough to jump on them first. As much as a realtor might’ve want a number that ends in ‘HOMES’ or ‘HOUSE’ or a mortgage broker a number ending in ‘LOAN’, these numbers simply weren’t available.

But with the release of the 855 number prefix, thousands of matching vanity numbers are available for these terms all-at-once. Not only can you get these premium words in your number, you can even find matches that have attractive surrounding digits, like repeaters. (e.g. ’855-33-HOMES’ or ’855-885-LOAN’, both available at the time of writing)

So what are you waiting for? Set forth, brave soul, and carve out your own brand identity with your very own vanity 855 number!

So I thought I’d do my best to turn these tips on their head, and in the process leave you some practical tips about securing a great vanity toll free number for your business.

Bad Tip #1:  Avoid Number Hybrids

This tip points out that numbers like 888-444-BIKE aren’t as valuable as, say, 888-FIX-BIKE for a bicycle repair shop. And they have a point – the latter definitely is more valuable. The problem with this argument, though, is that there’s only one 888-FIX-BIKE. That vanity spelling translates directly to 888-349-2453, exactly one phone number out of millions of toll free numbers. Care to take a guess whether or not it’s reserved already or in use? You’re trying to find a needle in a haystack with a pair of tweezers.

Meanwhile, a vanity search for 888-***-BIKE has hundreds of numbers that will match any 3 digits into those wildcard *’s. So you might end up with 888-444-BIKE or 888-345-BIKE, which isn’t exactly the same but is still wildly effective. To minimize any drawback of using matched numbers and letters, try to find repeating or sequential digits like in these two examples (444 & 345).

Bad Tip #2: Don’t Limit Yourself to 7 Digits

This proposed tip is really just an extension of the previous, but going beyond 7 letter vanity spellings with the addition of overdial. Overdial is the practice of using a vanity spelling that extends beyond the end of the actual phone number in order to complete the spelling. Like 888-MATTRESS. Really this number is 888-628-8737, and the extra ‘S’ is just a disposable digit.

Overdial itself isn’t really the problem. Going over a digit or two (preferably just 1, though) isn’t the worst thing in the world, such as locking in a number like 888-***-HOUS(E). It really goes back to the fact that finding an 8 digit vanity number is effectively finding a 7 digit vanity number, which again has you looking for exactly one number on every search. There’s only one 888-MATTRES(S). But hey, maybe you’ll get lucky?

Bad Tip #3: 800 vs. 866, 877, and 888

In this misleading tip, the author says you should aim for 800 over 888, 877, or 866. It’s true that 800 is a more easily recognized prefix, but 888 isn’t far behind. 888 numbers, after all, have been around for over fourteen years. By now, most people get it.

Also, this tip fails to mention the fact that SMS/800, the governing body over toll free numbers, has largely disabled the ability for vanity search tools to query the national database for available vanity numbers with an 800 prefix. Why? Because 800 numbers are so increasingly scarce that 99.99% of vanity searches would return no results and simply waste resources. Stick with 888, only going to 877 and 866 if you can get better vanity spelling availability out of those prefixes.

Bad Tip #4: Vanity Name Choice

Here we have some advice to be selective in what you say with your vanity spelling. Pick words that relate to your business, avoiding ambiguity where possible. Sounds great, with the exception that they again focus on whole number and overdial spellings like 888-LAWNCARE. No chance.

Vanity toll free numbers have been around long enough for a large percentage of the more popular spellings to be taken. To find a vanity number that fits your business, you’ll need to get a little creative and shorten up your vanity spelling to 4 or 5 letters at the most to give yourself a better chance to find some results. You still want to draw some kind of mental connection between your number and your business, like my 888-444-BIKE example above, but not at the cost of setting unreasonable expectations and not finding any numbers with which you’re happy.

Bad Tip #5: Avoid Q & Z

This one may be my favorite. Three years ago next month, the patent for an international standard for phone key pads went on the books. This is what you’ve likely come to think of as common on desk phones, home phones, and cell phones, with the 7 key representing “PQRS” instead of just “PRS” and the 9 key representing “WXYZ” instead of just “WXY”. Despite this change being over three years old, and the fact that it has become a widely-accepted international standard for new phones with English characters, you still see people advising to avoid vanity spellings with these digits.

The simple truth is, you shouldn’t go out of your way to avoid these letters if you feel they’re necessary to get the vanity toll free number spelling that you want. And just to be on the extra-safe side, if you feel so inclined, get in the habit of spelling out the digits of your vanity number anywhere that you display it. This is a good general practice already, something like “888-444-QUAD  (888-444-7823)”.

Bad Tip #6 Good Tip #1: Put Your Vanity Number Everywhere!

Finally, a tip that has some meat on it. Once you’ve actually found a vanity toll free number, it’s time to plaster it everywhere you can. Get it on your business cards, your website, your company vehicles, your letterhead, your tv spots, your radio commercials, your billboards, your office door, etc. Anywhere that you would reasonably place your company logo or slogan, pop your vanity toll free number there also. The value of your vanity spelling only gets better with repetition.

Looking to get vanity toll free number service for your business? Check out our free vanity search tool.

But beyond your napping “sleeping” habits and your personal preference to shower/shave/get dressed, the technology you deploy also plays a big role in whether your operation gets off the ground. Here are five of the top reasons you should consider using an 800 number virtual phone system for your home-based business, instead of just relying on your personal home or cell phone numbers…

1. Look & Sound Professional

Giving potential clients and customers your home or cell phone number is the easiest way to betray the size of your home-based business. Even if you’re borderline superhero when it comes to your entrepreneurial powers, you’re still going to lose opportunities if companies are afraid you don’t have the resources to take care of their needs.

An 800 number gets your foot in the door. With a professional-sounding auto attendant, voicemail service, and call forwarding to your home or cell phone, you get a professional image that reduces customer anxiety while still fitting your lifestyle. It’s not about tricking your customers — it’s about making a good first impression to earn the opportunity to show off what you can really do.

2. Nationwide Reach

Many entrepreneurs that work from home reach a nationwide audience via the Internet. To get anywhere with this kind of online business, you need to appear accessible. If you are advertising your contact phone number as a local number in Florida, you might have a tough time convincing customers in California that you’re the right business to take care of their needs. The problem is more than the customer having to dial long distance. If you seem far away, your potential customers might not feel secure giving you their business. Since 800 numbers are non-geographic, they immediately alleviate this problem and give you the appeal of a nationwide, fully-accessible business.

3. Maintain Your Privacy, Sanity

Just because you work out of your home, doesn’t mean you need to turn your personal life inside out and give up your private information to everyone with whom you do business. Having an 800 number that forwards to your other phone lines lets you keep your business life separate by maintaining the privacy of your home phone and cell phone numbers. Best of all, you can avoid 24/7 burnout by setting your 800 number call forwarding hours and days to draw a line as to when you’re “in the office” to take calls and when you need to be done for the day.

4. Prevent Missed Opportunities

As I mentioned before, one of the challenges of working from home is managing your professional and personal lives. On a micro scale, this can mean little interruptions in the middle of the day, like needing to leave home to pick up children from school or running time-sensitive errands. If you can’t avoid these tasks, you need to at least mitigate their impact on running your business.

With an 800 number, you get two quick benefits that keep you connected on the go. The first is Follow-Me-Live call forwarding that can track you down at multiple phone numbers to make a connection, such as your home office, cell phone, or personal home phone numbers. And if a missed call does reach your voicemail, it’s not the end of the world. With voicemail-to-email, your messages are delivered as audio file attachments to your email address, and you can even be alerted of these messages via text message. This gives you the ability to quickly return missed calls before they turn into missed opportunities.

5. Online Management Tools

Virtual phone systems are all about efficiency, getting more done with fewer resources and in less time. To keep you ahead of the curve, FreedomVoice 800 numbers are kept easy-to-manage with the WebLink Internet Control Panel. This secure, online back-office gives you total access to check your messages, change your settings, update your account information, run reports, and much more — from anywhere you have Internet access! With intuitive controls, you’re in control of your virtual phone system 24/7.

What are you waiting for? Get an 800 number for your home business today!

For decades, leaders in the telecommunications industry have pushed for greener solutions, encouraging and empowering business owners to create telework programs with technologies like virtual phone systems and the hosted VoIP PBX.

These technologies increase remote productivity and allow efficient management of remote employees. But even so, the adoption of telework programs is not progressing as rapidly as it should be. Perhaps part of the problem is a failure to realize the full environmental benefit of a nation working from home.

Our good friends at the Telework Research Network released some startling statistics about the impact of telecommuting yesterday, citing, “If every person in the U.S. with a telecommuting-compatible job worked at home on Earth Day, collectively it would:

– Save 900 million vehicle miles
– Save 45 million gallons of gas, $188 million in consumer savings
– Save 2.3 million barrels of oil, valued at $185 million
– Eliminate 423,000 tons of greenhouse gasses, equivalent to taking 77,000 cars off the road for a year
– Save 28 million kWh in net electricity, enough to power 2,600 homes for a year
– Save 775 people from traffic injury and deaths

And that’s just one day! Multiply those figures across an entire year, and you have an amazing potential to reduce commuter consumption and pollution and preserve the planet. The Telework Research Network also states that only 2% of the U.S. workforce telecommutes a majority of the time, though 40% could. So it’s time to start asking: what’s the hold up? Why are people that can telecommute not doing so?

I don’t think it’s because people like rushing out the door, thoroughly enjoy being stuck in traffic, and can’t live without their morning talk radio shows on the drive to work. I believe it’s a matter of culture – we’ve always left home to go to work, so it’s stamped on our brains and in our society that this is how it should be. On top of that, there’s a great deal of management anxiety and technophobia. An employee working out of their home has to be able to be held to the same standard as one in the office, and it is a tough sell to get some business owners to understand that there are tools out there to make that happen.

The decision comes down to business owners and managers. They have to be willing and able to responsibly create a telework program with technologies that allow for efficient management from remote. But getting to that stage is going to take a stronger movement from the office worker. If you could be telecommuting more, why not bring that up with your boss? Explain the benefits, how it can help the company, how you’ll be just as productive, if not moreso, from the comfort of your own home. They may say no, but at least you’ve planted the seed and can nurture it from there.

Let’s make the next decade about finding the answers that will get more people out of the office, of the roads, and working from home to help save the planet. Personal efforts toward conservation start by examining what you do every day, and if you can cross a long commute off your list, you’ll be doing the Earth a great big favor.

Happy Earth Day 2010!

Here are some useful tools you can use today to start testing and improving your website’s speed…

1. Page Speed from Google

Google started this whole conversation, so it’s only fitting that I lead with Google’s Page Speed for a website speed enhancement tool. Page Speed is an enhancement of the Firefox browser add-on an amazing tool you should already be using for any kind of web development and testing. If these two aren’t already a part of your tool belt, add them today. Page Speed with Firebug is an all-around winner, providing an in-depth analysis of your website and showing both what you’ve done right and what you’ve wrong. Effectively, this gives you a checklist of improvements that you can start making right away to your website.

2. YSlow from Yahoo

YSlow is Yahoo’s version of Page Speed, another enhancement to Firebug. Well, to be fair, YSlow has been around considerably longer than Page Speed — but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. At this time, which you use is largely a matter of personal preference. For me, it’s Page Speed, but part of that is based on whom I consider to have a better chance of improving the tool and integrating it with other tools (see #3) in the future. Even so, both provide important diagnostics and analysis, giving you a checklist of items to work toward improving your website. If you like YSlow’s interface better, or find it easier to understand, it will perform just as well.

3. Webmaster Tools from Google

Final word goes back to Google, who has integrated simple page speed analysis into a free service you may already use. That free service is Google’s Webmaster Tools, which shows you a number of useful things about your website and how it is crawled by Google. Once you’re set up with this service, the “Labs” section has a report called “Site performance”. This report shows how fast (or slow) your website happens to be, along with suggestions in the form of changes to your code that can help you create a faster experience for your visitors.

What If Search Engine Rankings Don’t Matter to Me?

Beyond search engine rankings, in fact the very reason behind Google’s decision, website speed is also a factor in how good of a visitor experience you’re providing. If your webpages take an eternity to load, you are likely frustrating your visitors. And they’re less likely to pick up the phone and dial your toll free number or shoot you an email for help, when they can simply go somewhere else. Like one of your competitor’s sites.

So even if you live on some planet where your websites search engine rankings don’t matter, you should still aim to optimize your page speed for the sake of your visitors.

While vanity toll free numbers of that caliber are hard to come by, there are still ways that your small business can get more out of an 800 number when it comes to making a name for yourself. Today I outline three straightforward steps to leading with your toll free number and building your brand.

Step 1: Get a Good Great Vanity Number

This is the hardest part of this process. The key here is to find a vanity toll free number about which you can get really excited. You want brain stickiness. When customers see your vanity number, it’s going to set up camp in the back of their mind. When they have need for your type of business in the future, they’re going to remember you first and not your competitors.

Certain vanity spellings can be very hard to find or simply aren’t available any more, and the national database doesn’t allow for searches on the “800″ prefix any longer. This makes it easy to settle on the first result you find or give up if you can’t quickly find something you like. Instead, get creative and brainstorm alternative ways that a vanity spelling can describe your business. Shorten up your vanity words – go for something that is only 4 or 5 letters, and then find a match that has a couple repeating digits leading into it (e.g. 8**-555-BIKE for a bicycle repair shop).

Alternatively, go for something that’s easy to memorize by way of repeating digits or ease of dialing. Remember 1-800-CALL-ATT? Dial down the middle! All of the vanity digits were located in the center of the dialing pad to make it easy to remember. Our own number is another example, 1-800-477-1477. Strong repeating digits, and all of the digits after 1-800 are dialed down the left side of a phone keypad.

So go ahead, start searching. I’ll wait. If you’re already a FreedomVoice customer, call us at 800-477-1477 ext. 2 and we can help you search and add numbers to your account.

Step 2: Put Your Toll Free Number Everywhere

Start with the obvious places – get your new vanity toll free number up on your website, on your business cards, and on your direct response advertisements. Then go further. Do you participate in social media like Twitter, Facebook, or putting videos up on YouTube? Get your toll free number onto these channels, both in your account profiles and in your outward communication.

Move to more niche spaces. Do you get new business through Yelp or Google Local? Make sure your toll free number is updated there. Add it to the end of your email signatures for yourself and any employees. Does your business have a street-facing sign or window? Delivery or service trucks? Yep, there too. Any possible place your business can be seen, whether online, billboard, radio, tv, or print, include your toll free number. Make it an integral part of your brand, as necessary as even the name of your business or your website.

Step 3: Provide an Amazing Caller Experience

Finding a great number may be the hardest part of this process, but the award for most important goes to making your vanity toll free number something your existing and potential customers enjoy calling. It doesn’t matter how attractive and memorable your number is if you’re frustrating those who do call with an unhelpful auto attendant, long hold times, rude representatives, or voicemails that don’t get returned.

Consider having your auto attendant professionally scripted and recorded. Keep your call forwarding and call queue hold times managable. Record calls to your customer support or other departments and review them online to make sure you’re providing only the best and most helpful service. And use features like voicemail-to-text to quickly follow-up on any missed calls.

You want to enlist your customers in your advertising army. You want them to spread positive reviews of your brand and drive people to your toll free number by word-of-mouth. The only way that’s going to happen is if you provide them with a happy experience when they contact you.

Have any ideas / experience with toll free numbers and branding? Comment below!