Today only from 12:01am till 11:59pm on August 8th, 2008 (aka 888) all regular activations are just $8.88, instead of $49.95. Yes, we’ve probably gone crazy and are definitely losing money on this. This is the only time we’ve ever done anything like this before and we’re definitely NOT going to do this again. There’s a strict limit of 8 numbers per customer and this ONLY applies to standard activations that say they’re Currently Available in the Instant 800 Lookup.

Just use the regular activation form on our website at TollFreeNumbers.com and there’s no codes or tricks necessary. We’ve just changed the price (to less than our cost!) for one day. There won’t be another toll free day like 8-8-8 in our lifetimes so we figured it’s OK to be a little crazy. And it’s a Friday so we can work all weekend if we have to, to catch up. But at midnight the prices goes back to $49.95 so don’t delay!

We all know ‘800’ numbers are preferable. They’re a brand name, like the .com of the domain name business. They give credibility and make you look like a larger more established company. They’re the best and in higher demand but that’s probably also why you can’t get them from most phone companies and there haven’t been any ‘800’ numbers at all, even random 800 numbers in the spare pool during the day for over a year.

We’ve even experimented by releasing a random ‘800’ number and trying to re-reserve it and it gets taken in less than a second every time, at any time of the day. There are some Resporgs that have literally set up an automated system to submit requests for any ‘800’ number all day long. When they come out at night they are taken within seconds and we’re lucky if we can get one request through before they’re just gone.

We have some random ‘800’ numbers immediately available if you need them.

People often ask if they can point a toll free number to their voip line or port a toll free number they get from us to a voip company such as Vonage. The answer to the first part is YES definitely. You can certainly point or forward your toll free calls to a voip line such as Vonage or any voip company.

The second question about porting or transferring the toll free number over to a VOIP service so they are the ones getting the calls to your local number is a little more complicated. The short answer is that YES, we will release the number to ANY phone company, voip or otherwise. However voip companies are usually pretty dumb about toll free service and may give you some very strange answers.

Read more about the options for 800 service to a voip number

Click to listen to the message then click the link on that page.

This came up recently in an email and I thought it was worth posting since people probably feel this way sometimes even if they don’t say so. Statistically some people are not going to get the numbers they’ve backordered. It’s worse than just the mathematical averages too in many cases for several reasons.

If you’re not getting the percent of backorders you had expected, there are several possible reasons.

1. You haven’t done a large enough sampling to go by the %.
2. You are in a competitive category.
3. You are looking for above average phone numbers.
4. You’re trying to get mainly ‘800’ numbers.
5. You’ve just been unlucky.
6. We’re not really trying to get your numbers for some reason.
7. The system doesn’t really work like we say it does.

The issues listed above are basically in the order of popularity or probability. Numbers 6 and 7 aren’t really there because there’s any reality to them, but I just wanted to include the theoretical possibility because that’s what customers sometimes think. We really do our best and do get a lot of good 800 numbers from Backorders

1. Any toll free number can be transferred to and serviced by any toll free service within the US or Canada by filling out a Responsible Organization Change Form (Resporg form) and does NOT need to be carried by the company that provides the local line.

2. Along with the resporg form you get from the new company, you just send in the Toll Free Birth Certificate™ we email with the toll free manual after the activation if the phone company requests a phone bill as the proof of ownership.

3. The customer information is pretty easy since that’s just your info and the only other information that probably need to fill out the transfer form is our phone company name Resporg.com and the ID code is QZA01 and you can add our resporg fax number 800-FAX-0095

4. Unfortunately, when trying to follow up on a transfer request, most phone companies tend to say that a number was rejected or something along those lines simply because it hasn’t gone through, as their standard response, regardless of whether it’s been sent all the way through to the releasing company or not.

5. The quickest companies that we work with get the numbers transferred and set up in two days or so, but most phone companies take at least a week to two weeks and you can’t assume that it will be done simply because you sent them the paperwork.

6. Most phone companies will reject a transfer request if the slightest thing doesn’t match because they don’t want to give up customers, but we are the exact opposite and much more lenient and we usually release toll free numbers the same day we get the request, much faster than anyone else in the industry.

1. Premium numbers are repetitive easy to dial numbers that we have broken down into four categories and are immediately available for between $99 for a 1 star #, $299 for a 2 star #, $599 for a 3 star # and $999 for a 4 star #.

2. Unfortunately you can’t just ask the computer for a “good” or “memorable” 800 number, since the computer can’t define good, so you need to give the computer specific queries defining exactly what you’re interested in, with the Instant 800 Lookup on the top of the page at TollFreeNumbers.com.

3. The best way to find premium numbers is to make queries with short 3 or 4 digit terms (or company initials?) with 3 or 4 *s at the beginning or the end and the premium ones will be the ones with the prices on them.

4. There are no other fees and premium numbers are activated and transferred to any other carrier you select the same as regular activations except they have to be processed manually so they’re working and ringing to the phone number you select, within 24 hours, not within a minute like regular activations.

Don’t assume your phone company has transferred your toll free number over just because you sent in the transfer request form.
It seems like today is the day for customers that sent in a transfer request for their toll free number and assumed it had been transferred. One customer transferred it or actually thought he had transferred it three years ago. You’d be amazed how often the paperwork never reaches us or even the resporg department at the new phone company.

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If you invest in and build a physical building on property that you are only renting, you are putting yourself more and more at the mercy of the owner. That’s because it’s hard to move a physical building. You’re not building up any equity from your rent, and you’re not building up any equity from all of the investment you’re making in the building either. Advertising your business with else’s phone number is the same thing because you’re building your brand name on someone else’s property. So not only the rent goes to them but every dollar of advertising builds up THEIR equity, not yours.

Don’t invest all your advertising to build up someone else’s brand name

The 800 Watch email and the Alternatives are from the monthly database we create not the live lookup. That’s why we tell you to click on whatever number you like in the email or the alternatives box to see the LIVE status. If it says it was available but was taken recently, that means that it was available in the monthly database but that isn’t available in the national database when it checks live.

Read more about how our system works like a search engine with a cached database

1. TollFreeNumbers.com is the internet’s only independent toll free search tool that makes it extremely quick and easy to search for and instantly activate toll free numbers that you own and can transfer to any 800 service you want.

2. All you have to do to check for a number is type in any length word or phrase into the white box in the search tool on the top of the page and to activate or backorder it you just click on the link in the Toll Free Search Results.

3. If a number says “In Use” then it’s active in the database with another phone company regardless of what you hear when you dial it, and if it says “Currently Available” we can activate it for you ringing to the local number you specify on the activation form, often in less than 1 minute.

4. Our look up tool doesn’t just check the number you submit, it searches multiple databases, finds dozens or even a hundred alternatives, numbers in disconnect, premium and random 800 numbers, and more and it doesn’t automatically lock up numbers you find available like most other websites do.

5. The computer is better at doing the searching and you can place the order right online, but if you have any question or need help give us a call at 1-800 MARKETER or email billquimby@billquimby.net and we’ll be happy to help you any way we can.

I was looking at things on the web tonight and noticed something that I thought was very ironic. I realize that Dial800 is using dynamic 800 numbers for tracking, but it seemed more than a little ironic that a company that promotes “800″ numbers as being better than 877 numbers, actually uses 877 numbers to contact them on their own website.

By the way, don’t use Dial800’s lookup tool because they are one of the worst offenders at not only reserving numbers that people lookup but then they saying they own them and want to RENT them back to the unsuspecting customer. I don’t mean to go into that but I can’t talk about them without mentioning that.

Every time someone shows you a new ad, whether it’s the printer with a proof or the new commercial you’ve just finished, get in the habit of calling picking up the phone and testing your toll free number. It only takes a couple seconds to test your toll free number and it might just save you an awful lot of pain and heart ache, not to mention wasted advertising dollars.

So any time you ask someone or someone asks you, “So what do you think?” translate that in your head to a reminder to check the phone number. That simple habit will only take you a couple seconds but it just could save your butt. A butt is a terrible thing to lose.

Selecting a phone company based on price alone is like marrying someone based on looks alone. That may be the easiest way to judge things by on the surface, but if that’s your only criteria you’re going to be very unhappy at some point. The same can be said for a nice website too. And don’t fall for a fake review site like TollFreeReview.com either, because on the internet it’s easy to make multiple versions of fake companies and sites that look nice and credible on the surface, but again have no depth.

Would you select your car based just on price, or your cereal, or your house or even your soda? A low price is great, but the mistake many people make is thinking that price is the only factor to base their decision on for their phone service. You need to realize that the very cheapest company is the cheapest for a reason. It may mean they are adding additional fees somewhere, or they have less customer service or they may outsource the customer service overseas. They may be new and willing to do anything for a sale, or they may they may be having financial difficulty. Maybe they lower their feeds only to raise them later on. Some companies play with the instate rates or even change their definition of a minute and charge you for two minutes for each minute you’re connected to your customer.

There are 2 things to help you find the best company plus our guarantee

You’ve probably heard Lending Tree’s slogan, “When banks compete you win.” Well we have a different version. When phone companies compete YOU win. That’s nothing amazing or new though. We’ve had the ability to select phone companies since the breakup of AT&T in 1984 and toll free numbers have available from competitive phone companies since the early 90s. But there’s something else, even more important.

You don’t want them to stop competing do you? How they perform AFTER you select them is actually a lot more important than how you think they will ahead of time. You don’t just want to be able to pick the best company for your needs right now. Even more important than being able to pick phone companies is being able to change 800 providers in the future if the one you pick doesn’t turn out to be as good as you thought or changes.

We're the only company that guarantees you the ability to transfer your number away if the company you select doesn't turn out to be as good as you expected!

There’s a much higher turnover rate in disconnected 800 numbers than most people realize because most vanity numbers are invisible since they’re usually referred to by the digits. That’s why we redo the 800 Watch research for visitors using our Keyword Lookup, because good numbers related to the terms you’re looking for get disconnected.

The 800 Watch can help you be in the right place at the right time, to turn someone else’s garbage into a brand name number for your business. We have essentially a four month crystal ball that sees a couple months into the future for the numbers coming out.

We also allow the first customer requesting it to backorder a number. We’ll do the research to calculate the exact date it comes out and we’ll try to grab it for you that first second it comes out. We can only take the first customer that backorders a disconnected number and anyone else has to be turned away. So if you like a number make sure you backorder it right away.

“Locking Up” a number is the term we use when you do searches on the wrong website and a number that was previously available is suddenly reserved by them without a specific request to do so.

We’ve written several posts about companies that do this such as The Dark Side of Shared Use, and we’ve put up some warnings about searching for toll free numbers on other websites too, such as Searcher Be Ware. But this still happens to a lot of people.

Some of the worst offenders

Unfortunately slimy companies like CustomTollFree.com, CallSource, Dial800, OneBox, TollFreeNumber.org and GotVMail.com don’t post any warnings and most look very legitimate, but they’re Fake Pone Companies and as soon as you search for an 800 number there, the number you wanted gets sucked up and suddenly isn’t available anywhere else. In some cases if you talk to them they will even reserve other neighboring numbers as well to make sure you can’t get anything else either.

We want to help you get your toll free vanity number back if it gets Locked Up!

That’s right Tollfreenumber.ORG clearly hacked our website to hide the links internally to the posts we’ve written about them. It was very cleverly hidden in the Google Analytics plugin file, googleanalytics.php and it left the links to an article about Hidden Fees the article that showed Tollfreenumber.ORG clearly backdated the age of their organization by several years and second article about Tollfreenumber.ORG making up fake statistics all underlined but with no link. It only affected these posts about TollFreeNumber.Org and it even blocked View Source from working in IE.

I guess that’s one way to respond to someone who shows that you’ve lied about things if it’s true and you really can’t dispute it.

Some people confuse what they personally like or what their friends or customers say they like for the things that get the best results. If you had a car dealership you might prefer softer more professional advertising, over the loud in your face banners and balloons. Your friends and neighbors may all say that like the quieter approach, but in the end, car dealers all find that loud in your face promotion sells more cars.

You may not personally like having to think about translating the letters when you dial. You may think it’s easier to just enter the digits. But your goal isn’t really to make it easier. Your goal is to maximize the results and for results vanity numbers beat numeric numbers every time (with only a few exceptions).

Don’t fall for that trap of confusing what you or other people say they like with what actually gets more calls and sales for you.

When you see that in the Search Results of the lookup tool, that generally means you entered a 1 or a 0 for the first digit of the phone number which isn’t valid in North America. If you stop to think about it, it probably doesn’t look quite right either

So if you entered 123-LOAN or something like that try 321-LOAN or better yet, try just entering this shorter term like LOAN and let the computer put things before or after it or look for any version that ends a LOAN or whatever your word is.

That may sound ridiculous but a lot of people don’t even realize that if they got their toll free number directly from their phone company, some phone companies might claim that it’s THEIR number NOT YOURS and refuse to release it or in some cases even yank it back even after it’s taken away.

That’s exactly what happened to LaRick Calhoun recently. He got an 800 number from Onebox (J2 Global (NASDAQ: JCOM), also the parent company of Efax) and used and has advertised it since October 2007. When he decided he wanted to transfer it away however, he was suddenly surprised by the fine print at Onebox.

Not only did Onebox say he owed them money but they even filled out forms for the SMS claiming they are the customer!

How big of a misdial problem is associated with the ZERO instead of the letter “O”?

That isn’t usually much of a factor except in very high volume, easily monetized commercial situations. In other words, unless you get a huge number of calls for something that people can easily make money from, it really doesn’t matter much. The best example of it being a problem is 1-800 FLOWERS. It’s easy for any florist to take orders and just send them via FTD to anywhere, so with their high volume of calls, that was an issue.

However, for 99.8% of the customers getting toll free numbers, with O’s it’s not a problem or concern at all. The bottom line is NOT to bypass or even worry about using a vanity number with an O in it. I would only try to get the misdial zero option if it were a high volume of calls and something that a competitor could easily make money from. On the other hand, don’t forget to check the misdial versions of your competitors or if you’re a distributor of a product check the main company’s number for misdials. Many people make a lot more money than you would suspect almost invisibly on wrong numbers.

There are a lot of new numbers to process this month! The July update went online on Wednesday 7/16 and we’ll send out 35,000 updated 800 Watch reports Wednesday and Thursday.

Everyone else needs to know more than just what type of business you’re in but why you’re the BEST. They want to know the benefits and what makes you better in some way, or different. So many people look exclusively for generic terms, thinking that will require less advertising to let people know what type of business they’re in, forgetting that people don’t buy from you just because you’re in that business.

And don’t think that “better service” or “higher quality” counts as a benefit. If it’s not a SPECIFIC benefit it won’t help much. Think about yourself. If someone says you look good today does that make you feel as good as if someone says they like your new hair cut and the color of your shirt really makes your face light up. We believe specific benefits more than general benefits or compliments. So don’t just say you’re better, say EXACTLY HOW you’re better!

It’s easier to waste your money and blend in than it is to be creative, but it's easier to fail than it is to be successful too.

Someone recently asked me a couple questions that I thought was worth adding on the website.

First of all we make recommendations because our customers need them. It would be wrong to give someone a number without giving them any help on where to take it for the service and ongoing use. We also have years of experience in this business so it would be wrong not to try to pass that experience and knowledge on. That’s what a lot of our website is designed to do, to educate customers which is why I thought this was worth passing on, because if one person thought this was worth asking, there are probably other people that wonder about things like this as well.

The industry actually doesn’t work the way the question suggests it does. We are agents for Opex and PNG, but that’s because it’s necessary to have an agent to use their service. If you call them directly they will refer you back to an agent, and they will tell you it takes longer because and requires more forms and might quote you a higher rate. We offer it at the lowest price, have simplified the paperwork and streamlined the process if you use the people and fax numbers I recommend, so it’ll get done in two days instead of a week or two.

Read the rest about why we recommend toll free services.

If you’re on a service that gives you so-called “free” minutes, you’re still paying for them. Making you pay for a few free minutes in lieu of changing a monthly fee isn’t bad. But if they tell you that you get 600 or 1000 minutes FREE, don’t be an idiot and think they’re really just giving them to you because they’re not. It’s really just a way to sell you more service than you need.

Ironically the people that this appeals to are the ones that need and should use it the least, namely the people that don’t know how many toll free minutes they’re going to use. They also don’t realize that they really can’t control how many people are going to call you. It’s not like you can have suddenly make a bunch more calls come in at the end of the month if you have unused minutes.

Buying bundles or blocks of minutes may sound smart on paper, but it’s almost never a better deal than paying a competitive price for just what you use, especially when you’re starting out. Selling blocks or buckets of minutes doesn’t prove that the company is a scam but it does show you’re probably dealing with a Fake Phone Company at least. And it’s definitely a big red flag similar although not quite as bad as the Unlimited toll fee scams. The best example of this is and someone you should definitely avoid is 800pbx.com. They sell nothing but buckets of minutes because it makes people buy more than they use and more money for them. Don’t buy blocks or buckets of minutes for your toll free number if you can avoid it and NEVER let them talk you into that if you don’t have a track record and know how many calls you’re going to get.

There’s something special happening one month from today that won’t happen again for another 98 years. August 8th is 8/8/08 also known as 888, the last toll free day of this century. Last year we had 8-7-7 and the year before we had 8-6-6 but there won’t be another toll free day for 98 years. So this is the last toll free day in most of our life times.

Toll free numbers have been around for 41 years and 2 months since May 1967 and their popularity is at an all time high because they’re more affordable and easier to find than ever before thanks to a unique and innovative activation service from TollFreeNumbers.com, the Internet’s Toll Free Search Engine, where they specialize in finding toll free vanity numbers for only a one time fee of $49. But in celebration of Toll Free Day, they’re giving away toll free numbers for FREE. In order to celebrate this very rare occurrence TollFreeNumbers.com is giving away FREE toll free numbers on 8/8/08. See the website for details.

By the way it’s also to celebrate the founder of TollFreeNumbers.com’s 1 year old daughter’s 1st birthday who was appropriately born on 877 last year.

Toll free numbers are great but don’t forget a local number if you market internationally. Our toll free numbers in North America are good for callers anywhere in the US, Canada and a few small territories, but they’re not able to be used by most of the rest of the world. Some countries have a dial-around access number that lets callers pay the cost to get to the US. But unfortunately there’s no good solution for international 800 service and most people internationally won’t be able to reach you.

At least put your local number on your website where international customers tend to go.

$10 off Regular Activations from 3pm (est) July 3rd through Sunday July 6th. The regular price for regular toll free number activations is reduced from $49 to $39 for the Holiday Weekend. We’re doing this to wish you and your whole family a very Happy 4th of July.