Image Credit: Cash

I thought about writing this for a long time. While I am in the process to foreclose my unused Internet assets and web properties, I was able to generate Google AdSense income on many of those sites. So I am here to share that with you.

First of all, this is NOT a long term way to generate significant passive income. This will just generate some extra income to pay for your Starbucks coffee, iPad or fancy digital camera gadgets. It will also give you a quick start to test your niche. However, You will need to put more efforts into it to generate significant income.

I am about to close the last chapter of my SLOWLAN Passive Income plan, but I do know there are people out there trying to create extra income and they value their money more than their time. This is for them! It’s a SLOWLANE way to generate extra money. If you want a FASTLANE way to generate money, you need to create an automated system.

So what do you need to accomplish it?

1. An idea about a specific niche
2. Free Website to host your content and Google Adsense or Affiliate program
3. Get your website indexed
4. Get your site linked
5. Get Traffic
6. Keep posting unique content

Many people don’t have extra money to purchase cheap domain name. They don’t have to. The following sites allow you to create free website without costing you a penny. I don’t recommend to use those sites for your Google Adsense passive income for reasons. They do serve the purpose of creating quality DO FOLLOW backlinks.

1. WordPress.com – This is the largest and most famous blogging platform. You can also download your own from WordPress.org to host on your own servers. WordPress.com DO NOT allow you to post Google AdSense (Javascript) on your website unless your site has tons traffic. In that case, you’d better host your own site.

2. Weebly.com – Weebly is so far the best FREE, simple, and flexible website builder behind Google’s blogger for Adsense. It doesn’t have lots unnecessary features and it runs super fast! However, you are sharing 50% off your Google Adsense profit with them. The selling point is that you can really create a multi-pages website is less than 20 minutes. They have pretty good SEO features.

3. Webs.com – A very robust and complicate website builder that is over kill. It means slow page loading. They also share 50% of your Google Adsense profit. They make their system so robust, you will end up hiring someone to do the work for you. Ouch!

4. Yola.com – Good for backlinks and nice landing page. However, their site is slow and their website traffic is fading.

So here you go. I pick Google’s Blogger.com for few reasons.

1. It’s Google’s property
2. It’s simple and stupid easy to setup.
3. You can post anything
4. You own 100% Google AdSense profit
5. You can auto post content from third-party script or write your own

Few things that Google Bloggers bothers me.

• No Fancy Template
• No Flexible Layout
• Too many spam blogs
• Sloppy comment system
• Poor SEO

Here is what I’ve done on Google’s Blogger. I have about 70+ blogger websites linked to each other. Each one of them represent different niches or regions. It took me few hours (SLOWLANE) to setup each site with different template, header image, sidebar and scheduled two week content. One beauty of using Google Blogger is that Webmaster Tools can automatically pick your blog based on your GMail account. You can them add Google Analytic code to the template quickly and almost instantly get indexed.

My best record is to get my new blog indexed in 3 minutes. Awesome!

Once you’ve done that. You can start sharing and generate backlinks from all the sites and make comments everyone of them. Many of these processes can be automated or outsourced.

In my case, I automatically post new content from my main site every night (FASTLANE). The key point is to create 100% unique content. Thus, if you can’t automate your process to create new content, running 70+ websites will kill you!

Once again. This process took me a while to put in place and to run smoothly. One BIG RISK is that you don’t have control. If Google ban your site, you are DONE. So far, there is only 1 site out of 70+ are banned by Google. Obviously it was reported by my competition in the same niche. So I start a better one.

I hope this give you some idea about how to make money online in the SLOWLAN way and inspired you to make it a FASTLANE passive income generator.

The idea is to create a system or process to make money.

Good luck.

Image Credit: Property In Europ

I know this title sounds horrible. As I am on my way to invest more real foreclosure properties for rental and cash flow, I also have bunch unwanted Internet Assets and Web Properties to get rid off. A successful entrepreneur should knows when to get started and when to exit. I am about to lose my control and destroy my own hard work by owning too much garbage web properties.

It’s almost 2012. It’s time to review what I got myself into in the past 6 years, and how I plan to clean up my own inventory.

Here are the accumulated assets in the past.

• 30+ registered domains. This does not include subdomain and those domains on blogger, tumblr, wordpress.com and so on.
• 15 active websites, including my personal blog, digital photography blog, online stores, passive income niche directories using DirectoryPress, business websites, few clients website.
• 15 inactive websites that I have no time to implement
• 70+ third-party websites on other domains for SEO and automation purpose
• 26 Twitter accounts
• Maintaining 40+ Gmail accounts for different purpose
• Operating 4 Google Voice #
• Managing Several Facebook Accounts for different businesses and clients
• Administrating 21+ clients’ Facebook fanpages
• Monitoring 21 personal profile page all over the place on Internet. Thanks to my pool management of personal branding strategy.

I know what you will say. What a mess. Honestly, this is how I got myself in troubles.  And it certainly was the main reasons I can’t move faster on my major projects. This is the #1 cause of self-excuses not to move on. It is simply too much work to do and I chose to do them all. And I end up get nothing done!

So now you know. You should not make the same mistake like I did here. It’s time to clean them up or just get rid of them.

Other than those inactive web assets, domain hanging there generate no cash flow. The rest of are actually not that bad. Most of them do generate Google Adsense income and some are creating monthly recurring passive income. The biggest issues is that I miss use my time on not-so-profitable projects and miss my own deadline on the profitable projects. On the other hands, I was spending too much time on Facebook and Google+ trying to get something out of there. I truly wonder how much pro-claimed social media expert got from those two places.

This is the biggest mistake!

The reality is this. If you have to spend 40+ hours a week working your ass off to achieve your dream. You are NO success entrepreneur. At least, you are just a slave of your own creation. From my perspective, a really successful entrepreneur achieves their goal and have time to spend with their lovely families, friends and enjoy their life without work. That is how the 1% lives!

I need to foreclosure or short sale those unwanted properties. At the end, there will just be few projects to work on.

1. Real Estate Property Investment
2. Project A -Internet advertisement
3. Project B – Niche Directories
4. Project C – Content Distribution and Automation
5. Project D – Luxury and High End Online store

This is going to be enough for me to focus on! I also need to fire some customers that keep dragging me down. That’s for now.

How many Internet Assets or Web Properties you currently own? Do you overly brand yourself and end up not going anywhere? Tell me how you solve it!

I know I will piss 99% of the people who read my blog post. That’s OK. My blog is for people like me, who wants to be the 1%.

Personally, American dream isn’t about being the 99%. It’s about being the 1%.

You can blame on richer people or politicians, but you can’t deny the fact. They’ve achieved what the 99% can’t not achieve. It’s the reality and it’s just like the food chain. You have to work your way up. The brutal world isn’t fair. You have to put your effort into your future.

Put yourself in the 1%’s shoes. You will see the world differently.

The fact is that poor people becomes poor, because they make the wrong decision. Really. If you have that much time complain about the 1%, why don’t use spend those time to become the 1%.

If you chose to be the 1%, you will have chance to be one of them. If you think you are the 99%. Sorry. You will never be the 1%. Don’t complain your condition just because you are the majority! Your future is in your hand. Don’t occupy the street. Do something!

I love to hang out with the right people with right mindset. You can call me BS or dislike me. I said what I said and I am telling the truth from the bottom of my heart. You can choose not to listen. It’s your choice.

Be the 1% isn’t easy. The candy bar isn’t sweet until you taste it. You get the point.

It’s been a long time since my last crash on Affiliate Marketing in 2001-2003. At that time, I really don’t know where I will be going with affiliate marketing. There were only few big player at that time such as Amazon and commission junction. Everyone is selling the same things while only getting 4% commission from the big player.

Every since Facebook becomes a money maker and play ground for new comers to generate income, I have to rethink the possibility of using social media to generate extra passive income. Don’t get me wrong. Affiliate is a great way to generate significant income, but it has a fundamental fraud.

You have no control.

Your advertiser can easily decline your effort and stop paying you once for all. It also requires tremendous hard work to find new offer, new merchant and new way to promote other people’s products.

Just yesterday, I went the women expo in Phoenix. You can see people are dump their hard work money from their wallet and buy something really unnecessary at the trade show. So I decided to have a good look from the Aisle 100 about affiliate marketing.

There are two ways to make passive income with affiliate marketing. You pick your own choice.

Affiliate Marketer

Most people with or without good knowledge about Internet choose to become affiliate marketer. This is definitely a slowlane way to earn significant income, but it does possibly generate good income. The fact is that only few top notch affiliate marketers have done so. Most affiliate marketer exaggerate their results.

Here is what you need to become an affiliate marketers.

1. Find the niche(s) – This is one of hardest part. You need to find a great niche that has buying potential with higher profit margin.
2. Setup website(s) – You need to setup multiple websites to list all the affiliate offers and get traffic to your site.
3. SEO and More SEO – Without good SEO (search engine optimization), you won’t get steady traffic and you will not get good conversion
4. Generate Traffic – Use Facebook Fanpage, Twitter, Email Marketing, Press Release to create buzz and generate traffic to your website.
5. Conversion – Without a good conversion rate, you will never earn good affiliate commission
6. More Offers – This is also the hardest part. In order to increase your sales and revenue, you have to keep looking for good deals and products to offer your visitors. This is time consuming process. Most affiliate marketer failed, because they dump everything they find onto their website.

Create Affiliate Network

Personally, this is going to be the fastlane to make passive income. Basically, people are selling your products or services. You just need to make sure you offer good products and services that is attractive enough to generate LEADS!

1. A High Profitable Margin Products – This is your key to success. Or you have to get enough volume to do very well.
2. A profitable commission structure – How does 30%-40% commission sounds to your publisher? While most merchant offer 3-15% commission.
3. A great network of publisher – This is where you can scale up your operation, sit and watch your revenue grow.

Now it’s your decision on which business model you are going for.

Personally, I pick both. I’ve built WordPress website for a while, I now turn them into a semi-automate affiliate marketing site. One of the website is now reaching 900 unique visitors a day since my friend and I launched the site in late August 2011. We are also getting more than 14K fans on one of our fanpages. Other than paying ourselves salary, the website is almost break even.

I also have a product that can generate good income with volume. It’s not a high price luxury items, but it’s something everyone can use everyday. I am on my way to turn that into an affiliate network.

Anyone who wants to earn residual income will not miss my 30%-40% commission offer. Would you?

With the help of Facebook Social Reach and Google Image Search, taking affiliate marketing to the next level is much easier than in 2001.

Time to get back to work. Feel free to contact me, if you are interested in how I do both, I am more than happy to share that in the near future.

Join me on my Fanpage and you will be the first one to see my update.

It was a 3 days 2 night getaway weekend without computer and outside communication. I got a lot of time thinking the past and the future. With the bad news of the death of Steve Jobs, it’s never clear that health is always the first thing. Wealthy will follow.

So I have to make some changes again in my life to NOT live like Steve Jobs, but to achieve what Steve Jobs has achieved.

2011 is almost the end. Although I was dong great the first half year, the last 3 months of 2011 is simply horrible. 2 customers left me. One has limited budget and one close the business. Economy isn’t coming back any time soon.

However, people are still spending money like crazy. So who they are? How do I do business with those people and get money from them.

Every since I started my project A in 2009. It was a great learning experience. Although it is continually growing, it never grow the way it is supposed to. I should have done much better than this. Shame on me. The problem #1 of the project A is the time I spent on selling it. I admit that I am not a good sales person, so I should have someone to help me to sell. The problem #2 is the profit margin of the project. Ever it does generate passive and recurring income. The profit is just too low while the volume is not growing faster enough due to problem #1, which is not attractive enough to get people to sell it. It’s Chick and Egg Question.

So things has to be changed again. By looking at what I have done and what I haven’t done, I see new opportunities. Make a good living is no longer my goal. The new goal is to achieve something, that I was not expecting myself to accomplish. I was not expecting myself to grow dramatically, so I did NOT grow dramatically.

There are few things required to make 2012 a successful year.

1. A huge targeted crowd to generate the traffic
2. A good profitable margin product
3. A solid lead generation system
4. A redistributable advertising platform

Winter is coming to the Arizona. It’s the best time of the year for outdoor activity. You will see more photos coming for sure!

Well. I have been distracted for days and worked on a NOT SO FASTLANE project and hopefully to create a secondary passive income that will last for a while.

I decide to build a several local niche sites to generate recurring income.

While I was hanging out with my wife on the Cozumel beach and taking photos, I was also making passive income on one of my sites. I did not realize how much I was making until I came back and check my Google AdSense Account. Holy awesome. There are whole bunch clicks on a specific topic that generate $4 to $7 per click. And there are many clicks.

So I dig into a little bid more and realize that there are people paying $7 to generate leads which will generate $60-$300 in return. That is over 500% return.

Although, the market is crowded, there are huge space for me to tab in at local region. Especially I can do much better SEO than those guys. The key is to create the niche directories that get hit a lot. When you have traffic, you can make $ out of your Google AdSense and recurring subscription income.

So I need a good directory script. I thought about writing my own and decided not to. Time is money. Company like Groupon started with WordPress and later move on to proprietary programming. So I download and install the DirectoryPress Theme that is perfect for my current situation.

What makes this theme an awesome one is that it supports multisite WordPress installation. So I can install one theme with multiple layouts once. I can later create unlimited instances (subdomains) with just one codebase. Also, it only costs $79 for unlimited install and upgrade. Isn’t that great? You can get the DirectoryPress Theme now.

Enter the Coupon Code to Save $20.

JUNE2011

After playing with the theme for two days and made some code modification and theme customization, I have 3 directories site created already. With wildcard domain configuration on GoDaddy, I have unlimited potential.

Of course, the downside is this. The more sites I created, the more SEO work and marketing work I need to do. I will also face the chicken and egg question where is no data in the directories. So I have found someone who is interesting in promoting the niche directory and earn 30% commission out of it.

In general, you will need a good understanding about PHP programming language, so you can modify the code to do what you need. Some stuff is just not fully implemented.

Guess what is just happening? I already got one signup with the most expensive package without me doing too much.

Really. If you want to create a niche directory website and earn passive income, DirectoryPress Theme on multisite WordPress setup is what you need. I highly recommend.

If anyone of you are interested in do so and want to know how I use GoDaddy and your my shared webhosting at MidPhase to run these niche directories, I will cover that in the future post.

Well. From Google’s perspective, my business sucks! It’s time to look back and give my self a serious examination.

Plenty of competitions

My online stores are at the idle mode. The income doesn’t really cover my cost to bring new customers in.  There are few reasons that I don’t consider e-commerce store my dream maker.

• Too much hassle to deal with customer service, inventory and drop shippers
• Too many competitions in the industry
• No proprietary technology to stand out from the crowd.
• Too easy to get in, but hard to get out!

I am not saying e-commerce is not possible to make fortune on the Internet. It’s primary due to the industry I am in and I don’t have my own brand and products. I have NO control!

My main project to promote local businesses is growing slowly. Revenue is tripled compare to 2009, but it’s not good enough to be proud of. I am far from becoming a $6B company like Groupon. The main power to drive the business rely heavily on search engine optimization (SEO). However, the biggest risk also came from SEO. The following diagram shows the search engine traffic since I launch the site in March 2009. The search engine traffic was going very well and becomes flat. I don’t know where I will be going with SEO, because the ROI is way down.

Not to mention that there was 17 competitions in just Phoenix area when I started in 2009. Now some of them went under and some of them are now behind me. Most of them are no where to be found on the major search engines, but they are doing great on social network and building viral relationship with end users. Some of them were brought out by Groupon clones. Now, there are more new comers trying to do what I do or become Groupon clones. So I’d better move faster.

Start from scratch or become a clone?

I have this debate for a while. There are about 20 Groupon clones in just Phoenix area. Every TV station and newspaper now have their own daily deals site to catch the social buying and group buying train. Where am I in the game? Should I follow the crowd and become Groupon clone too?

The fact is that almost every Groupon clone is making some money. Have I made that much?

I really suck at sales and marketing!

I truly believe that I can write the best code in the world. Some of the program I wrote years ago are still running in many International companies. I am just not good at sales and marketing.

Even I have a friend helping me out on sales and marketing, He is not much better than I am. This situation need to be changed.

Right direction with right vehicle!

Google obviously knows where the money goes. Local is the next biggest things since DOT COM era. I am in the right industry on the right direction, but I need the right vehicle. So I have a new idea that is extended from my current project and Groupon’s success.

I can’t really reveal the idea, because a good idea is just an assumption. It has no meaning until it is executed. However there are characteristics in the project.

• No front cost or low cost to local business owners
• Unique user driven content
• Create a sense of emergency
• A self-motivated sales force
• Easy to use
• No inventory and No Shipping
• Forget about SEO.
• Forget about economy
• Forget about supporting local businesses

Am I crazy? Isn’t that violate my own purpose of creating this project, if I don’t support local businesses?

To be honest, I have tried my best to support local businesses and realized that most local businesses I support don’t even care about what I do. That really really pissed me off. All they want is to get everything FREE and go cheap while I am trying to help them?

Does Groupon support local businesses? They may say so in their press release, but what they did is nothing but making good fortune off local businesses. Local business is the biggest loser.

Really. Business is a brutal world. If you are too nice and too naive, you will be eaten alive.

I can still talk about support local businesses for a great cause, but it will just be part of the Marketing strategies.

Building the team!

Really. The biggest mistake I have made in the past 2 years is working alone and working with the wrong people. I should re-read the Good To Great book again. It basically says that the most important key to make a good company a great company is people. It’s always WHO first.

I have learned the lesson. The lesson is not about learning sales and marketing. It’s about learning how to run a company like real entrepreneur. If I want to achieve my goal as Lifestyle Entrepreneur, It’s about time to make that happen!

2011 is going to be a dramatic year. It’s not the year for Mr. Nice guy or the guy who take every crap dumped on him.

Goodbye 2010.

To achieve my dream lifestyle to travel around the world, passive income is the only way to make it happen. In the past few years, I have tried many things and now identify the direction. I am learning it the hard way. I should know better few years ago.

Regardless which method you choose, there are bottom line requirements to make this true passive income business.

1. Automation – The only way to make passive income is NOT to work on it. Or simply spent few hours a week to do minor tasks.
2. Outsource – Let other people do the work for you
3. Scalable & Profitable – The only way ensure your business model can last a long time, the business must be scalable and profitable.

Basically, it follows The 4-Hour Workweek principle.

Here are the methods I am working on.

1. Advertisement

Running a popular niche website and generate advertising revenue is probably the easiest way to generate passive income. Using Google AdSense, and many other advertising medias or affiliate programs,  a website can generate pretty good income. The challenge is to make the website popular and convert.

2. Subscription based Membership website

Create a niche community for people who have common interest to exchange information or added value will bring in good passive revenue as well. It doesn’t matter if the community is B2B, B2C or C2C, the idea is to have user generated content to drive the revenue.

3. Licensing & Franchising

In my opinion, this is the most difficult method to generate passive income, but it will generate most revenue. For example, if you created a software or script that can be licensed to other people for a recurring fee, you can generate great revenue on this.

What about e-commerce?

To be honest, I haven’t really found the unique niche to make e-commerce a passive income business. There are few main reasons that a small e-commerce will never generate good passive income.

1. Inventory – Handling inventory is very expensive. It not just cost money to manage the stock, it also cost money to keep unsold items.
2. Customer Service – You should never outsource your customer service to third party. Handling shipping, return and complaint cost most of the the money in this type of business.
3. Not scalable – If your niche is not very much scalable, you won’t be able to make huge profit, even your items have higher profit margin.

My take on creating a passive income business is now solely based on the following guideline.

1. User generate content
2. No inventory
3. No shipping and return
4. Less customer services
5. Information only

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying they are the only few passaging income business model. I do believe they will work the best for what I know and what I do.

What is your passive income business?

Why is local search marketing so important?

If you read recent news, Google is trying to buy Yelp.com, the number one local review site, for $500 millions. As you may know already, Google Map, Google Earth are among many other Google services that are targeting local. Local oriented search in the past 2 years are also increasing dramatically. So It’s the right time to get local business listed and found. SEO is taking place in the local level as well.

There are many free resources and tools for local business to get found without spending a penny. For those local business who don’t want to deal with it and don’t know how to do it, I am more than happy to offer hourly consulting services.

So here you go!

First of all, there is no secret in the SEO world. Especially, doing local search marketing is even easier. All the resources and tools I mention in this post are FREE. However, a common SEO understanding is required to do it right.

Just to get you started, here are the top referral sites to one of my local customer site since September 2009.

• Yelp.com
  If your local business is not listed on Yelp, you are missing the most important piece of the local search marketing puzzle. Get your local business listed on Yelp now! Gogole love Yelp!
• Google Search (including Google mobile search)
  There is no doubt that Google is everywhere on mobile phone. With GPS built into modern mobile phone and smart phone, search local business is a snap.
• Twitter.com
  Do I need to mention say out loud? Twitter is one of the best tool to introduce your local business. Google, Yahoo and Bing recently start offering real time social search. So don’t miss this.
• ow.ly
  A shorten URL from Hootsuite.com. I personally recommend using HootSuite for your Tweet. You can easily schedule your local promotions tweet. Set and forget it.
• Blogcatalog.com
  You need a blog for your business web site. Register your blog on BlogCatalog.com and start blog about your business. This is one of the best blog network that send me traffic. Even they don’t offer do follow link, they do send you traffic.
• Facebook.com
  Do you have a fan page or app page for your local business? Do you know Google index Facebook fan page fairly quick?
• Foursquare.com
  This is the best GEO location based web sites and iPhone app I love. It allows you to check in to local businesses on your iPhone and see who else visited the place. Best of all, you can see other visitors’ tips about the place and the link Do FOLLOW. It also shows up on Google local search result FAST.
• maps.Google.com
  Are your local business listed on Google Local Center? Do I have to tell you what Google Map can do for you? You can even apply GEO Location data feed to customize map and distribute to many other sites.
• local.yahoo.com
  Are your local business listed on Yahoo Local? Do you now Yahoo Local is the oldest local search site? You will need real business address to be listed. PO Box or private mailbox is no good.
• local.Bing.com
  Bing.com is catching up. However, it takes a ridiculous long period of time to get verified. It still worth the time to register.

Now. There are many other sites that offer great exposure to your local business. They don’t directly drive traffic to your local business web sites, but you get your name out there on top of search engines.

• MerchantCircle.com
  This is a must have tool to get your local business name out there. You don’t have to pay for premium services, if you don’t want to. The free services will give you enough exposures. Just remember to keep your record fresh and make connection with other local businesses.
• SmartLocalShoppers.com
  This is a local marketing platform for local business to publish printable coupons and get list on major search engines. They also offer Google Map integration for nearby shopping and GEO location data feed that boost local business exposures on many web sites. It’s not free, but it is very affordable and works like charm.
• BrightKite.com
  This is actually my favorite site to check in the place I visited often. It allows other local people to find you.
• Meetup.com
  If you have some spare space available, why not offer that to local people an alternative choice to meet? Especially for those coffee shop, restaurant, Spa, Massage place, people meet and spend money.
• SmugMug.com
  Why is this important? I helped a local photographer convert her portfolio on to SmugMug. After customizing the layout and apply location data into the site, her site is listed on top of local photographer search result in a week. This is a highly recommended photo sharing site for professional photographer.

Those are the top sites I recommend. You may ask why YellowPage, SuperPage and many other local business directories are NOT listed? My answer is simple. They simply don’t work as well as I expect and they are expensive. You simply search a local business and see how many times local business page show up in the organic search results.

In many case, those links take you to out-dated page or the city page. You have to click many times to find your business page. Most visitors already give up after first 5 seconds.

You need to use the above sites wisely. DON’T SPAM. Otherwise, you may not see your business on search engine at all. Remember, it’s all about location location and location. Quality content and meaningful information is the key.

Still don’t know how to do it right? Contact me! I am more than happy to help!

[UPDATE 2010-10-21] Google Voice has since took over most of my voice communication for business operation. Read my post about Inexpensive ways to operate your online business – Voice, while making passive income.

Just got an email from AIM Phoneline team saying they are closing the FREE service on January 13th, 2009 (Black Friday). It’s too bad to see a great service closing their door.

I have been trying everything to lower the cost of operating a small business or home based business. It makes no sense to operate your small business with huge cost. Keeping your cash flow positive is always my priority.

I did a post about “AIMPhoneline vs Yahoo Voice vs Skype” a while ago. I decided to use free Skype-to-Skype calls for international communication to China’s manufactures and suppliers, since most of them are using Skype pretty heavily.  Skype’s calling plan may cost you fortune and Skype’s incoming call with online number will cost you fortune to forward calls to your landline phone or cellphone. Instead of using Skype to make calls, I will use Yahoo Voice to make calls to anywhere in the world with the lowest rate.

For incoming call, I rely on AIM Phoneline heavily. My clients place a call to the Free local phone number. I will pick it up when I am online with AIM client. They can leave voicemail as well. While I was traveling to Asia in 2006, I was able to pickup the phone in Taiwan. It only costs the caller local rate or long distance rate to the local number I am with. You can read my post about Best communication tool for your home based business – AIM Phone Line.

Now AOL is closing the wonderful service forever. I have to find an alternative solution. Here is what I have found!

Outgoing Calls:

1. Mobivox.com: The best quality and cheapest VOIP services. It allows you to call from any phone to Skype users for FREE. It uses the same international calling rates as Yahoo Voice, when you call landline or cellphone. Think about this. I don’t have to use Skype to call my suppliers in China anymore. I pick up the phone and dial the number. My suppliers pick up the phone on their Skype. Best of all, IT’s FREE! Did I say “FREE“?Another great thing about Mobivox.com is this. Cell phone cost US$0.10/minute to call anyone in USA, while Mobivox costs only US$0.19/minute to make calls to anyone in the USA. If I need to make calls in the USA, I use Mobivox instead of calling from my cell phone.
2. Yahoo Voice: I use Yahoo messenger all the time. It allows me to make call from Yahoo Messenger to my parents with the same low international rate. I have not used Yahoo Messenger that much since I found Mobivox. The downside of using Yahoo Voice is that you can only make call from Yahoo Messenger. So I only use it, when I am in coffee shop, airport, on beach and places with Wi-Fi access, where I don’t have landline phone to use.

Incoming Calls:

1. Google’s GrandCentral: I don’t remember when I got the GrandCentral’s account, but I have been using it for a long time to receive calls from people. I got a FREE local phone number. It allows me to forward the calls to my home phone, cell phone or to record voice message. I can choose to screen the calls with different ring tones and greetings to the callers. So far, it is still FREE!
2. Kall8.com: The cheapest 1-800 services that helps me save money on receiving incoming calls. It costs only US$2.00 / month to get a 1-800 toll free number. It costs very low to receive calls per minute. It also forward calls or record voicemail and do real time call screen. It also accept Fax and forward the PDF file to your email. It’s a wonderful services that I recommend!

If you are a small business owner or are running home based small business, you know that saving money is as important as making money. If you know any better low cost VOIP services that can save other small business from over paying phone services, please leave your comments and resources!