Freebies & Deals On Our Favorite Stuff for Home-Based Businesses, Work-At-Home Professionals, and Freelancers

We’ve used them, we like them, we think you will too.

If you don’t for any reason, give us a holler!

Virtual Office Tools

• With Skype you can make free calls anywhere in the world to other people with Skype on the their Mac, Windows or Linux computer, all you need his a headset with a mic (less than $10 at Target). The also offer cheap calls to ‘real’ phones and cell phones around the world.

Tom uses it every morning for serious business (team ‘radio’ for online car racing), but we also recently talked to a fellow in New Zealand about his WordPress shopping cart just as if he was next door instead of halfway around the world.

No cell minutes involved, no per minute cost—it’s free. So what if you want to talk to someone on a their real phone, not their computer? No problem, it’s not free but it’s really cheap. Click the logo below for details.

• It ain’t free, but FreedomVoice is the best toll-free phone service and voicemail you’ll find anywhere. We ran our aviation sightseeing and mock air combat business with it for 10 years, and loved it.

In fact, people would complain when we answered the phone, saying they wanted to listen to the rest of the messages such as: “I’m sorry we couldn’t take your call, but we’re busier than a one-armed wing-walker with a wedgie. Leave a message with you number, and we’ll call you back as soon as we get our feet on the ground.” We even had one that was something like, “Press 1 for information, press 2 for a reservation, press 3 for a gift certificate, and hit the pound key (#) if you hate voice mail.” When you pressed 4 you’d hear one of sound effects ssuch as “Pow!”, “Biff!”, “Bam!”, “Thud!”, etc.

But get this, on the rare occasion when someone did leave a message it would be emailed to us as sound file, along with the callers name, phone number, and address! You can even send a voice messages to a whole list of numbers simultaneously. And you can . . . .

There are far too many features and services to detail here, so check it out. It’s a great way to make a small operation look and sound very professional.

They’re very innovative folks, and can move very quickly if you have a special need. For example, they tailored their system to match a medical transcription customer’s old system so the doctors using the phones didn’t even know they’d changed services. But better than that, FreedomVoice provided new functionality that made managing the transcriptionist’s work much more efficient.

• Buy US Post Office postage, print labels, and order free package pickup online, all at no extra charge. Believe it or not we’re talking about the US Postal Service! They’ve joined the 21st century! Beware, there are some other companies out there that will sell you postage too, but they charge a ’service fee’ and, frankly, they’re a pain in the butt. We can’t tell you their name, but their website is stamps.com.

Website/blog hosting and SEO

• Over the years we used a lot of different web hosting companies. Dreamhost.com is the one we currently use, and the best we’ve found. Excellent customer support, many features that cost extra elsewhere, all for $7.95 a month. Once you have the hosting account you can host as many websites as you want, no extra charge.

• If you’re going to write a blog or build a website, we recommend Wordpress. We used Blogger—still do for Wow! Really? and Tailspin’s Tales—and we used to have Undress4Success there too. But we moved to Wordpress.com (the free, hosted version), and then moved again to our own host (at dreamhost.com) for what you’re reading now. Didn’t take any time at all (2-3 minutes) to be up and running at dreamhost.com, but we found you can’t run scripts there and you can’t add plug-ins. So now we have our own host, have a added a dozen or so plug-ins and find it’s the best solution out there. Either way Wordpress is free because it’s open source (the hosting, of course, isn’t.)

Job Resources

• Free Job Seeker Tools

Hardware Deals

We use both Macs and PCs here, but the Macs can run Windows software now thanks to OS 10.5 and a slick program Parallels, so you get the best of both worlds. Haven’t found a program yet that is unhappy in the Parallels environment, and it’s fast. That terrible old Microsoft program called Virtual PC is nothing like this. You Windows programs actually run in a Mac window, which is somehow apropos we think.

• Save $100 on iMac 24″ 2.4GHz only $1,694 + FREE Parallels 3.0 + FREE Printer and Shipping after rebate(s)
• Save $75 on Apple iMac 20″ Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz now only $1,419! Now ships with Mac OS X Leopard
• Leopard - The biggest Mac OS X upgrade ever! Available at MacMall - Single User $109.98 Family Pack $179.99

Printing & Copying

• Contrary to popular belief, business cards and letterhead are the last thing you need when you’re starting a business. But when the time comes for business cards and other office materials try OvernightPrints.com.

• Vista Prints does a nice job too, and their website has some real slick tools to help you design all kinds of materials.

Incorporation Help

• You don’t need to incorporate until you start doing business—if then. A ‘sole proprietorship‘ may be all you need, even if you’re not a cobbler. But if you do decide to incorporate your business or form an LLC you may realize substantial tax savings. The Company Corporation can help with all your incorporation needs. They service all 50 states and the whole online process takes less than 10 minutes. Click Here