Have you  ever found yourself in this situation?

You are driving the car, your kids are being loud, or you’re in a noisy environment and your phone rings with an strange phone number. . . and you instantly freeze staring at your phone debating whether you should answer it and run the risk of a potential client or customer being turned off by the noise in the background, or let it go your your personal unprofessional voicemail and risk losing the sale. You don’t know.

If you have a virtual phone number, either a toll free number or a local number, that forwards to your cell phone or home phone, with caller ID you’ll know that it’s a business call coming through so you can get to a quiet place and take the call. Or, you can let the caller go to a professional voicemail recording for your business.

How helpful is a virtual phone number?

I have like 5 of them. That said, eVoice is now giving away 6 month free trials. I have honestly never seen an opportunity like this. I’ve seen free 14 day trials, and free 30 day trials, but free 6 month trials? Never.

If you think this might be a good tool for your business click the banner below to get the offer.

Violations are not determined by the size of your company. And, when they contact you it’s not for a citation or for negotiations, it’s because you’ve already been tagged for the violation.

What’s the fine? I know of 3 businesses that were fined one for $25,000, another for $85,000, and a third for $100,000. And the last one was simply for not obtaining verifiable parental consent prior to collecting personal information from children.

What’s the solution? I personally use and recommend Len Thurmond’s Auto Web Law.

It’s a simple piece of software that you download and use right away. You simply choose the form you want, fill in the blanks and click “Get Document”.  Instantly, you have document you need for your website. Then you just cut and paste the text when you need it.

Here’s a screen shot of how it works:

For a closer look at Auto Web Law, click here.  They have 2 options:

1) Auto Web Law Pro – Has almost 70 documents. This is not a blanket legal forms software. This is for website owners and is being constantly updated as new laws regarding the internet come into effect.  (THIS IS THE ESSENTIAL PACKAGE)

2) Auto Web Law Pro + IPPP Intellectual Property Protection Plan – Includes legal forms to notify those who are stealing content from your website or digital books.  (THIS IS FOR ULTIMATE PROTECTION)

Both include Privacy Policies and Terms of Use forms.
Again this is exactly what I personally use to legally protect my websites.
If you don’t have it, get it.
Visit the Auto Web Law website HERE.

Here’s what Linda emailed me today, “Hi Nate: Thanks so much for the referral to Vistaprint. We just received our first order and they’re exactly the same as we’ve been ordering from our prior supplier – but at almost 25% of the price. Wow, that’s 75% off!!! We do a full bleed, glossy business card and are so sold on Vista Print that we’re now excited about having them print other marketing materials. – Linda”

We’ll here’s the unreal deal like I said, a FREE one!

Why would Vistaprint give away free customized business cards? It must be a trick right?

Nope. There’s no trick. You don’t have to order anything else. Just get your free cards. Vistaprint knows their cards are so good that, when the give away a free stack of them to business owners like Linda at Aloha Kine, they are confident that the business owner is going to be a new client for life. Was it worth giving away a free stack of cards? Absolutely.

I found the banner below and put it in this blog post so you can get your free cards.

Give ‘em a shot, it’s free.
On a side note, I honestly don’t know how long this offer is going to last but if the banner is still down there, click it and jump on the offer before Vistaprint takes it down. . . here it is ↓↓↓↓

For those of you who have been attending my workshops on a regular basis, you know that I often recommend a specific company by the name of GoDaddy for registering hosting and domains. Well, things have changed for me and I have new hosting and domain favorites,  and what are they?

For domains, I recommend NameCheap.

For hosting, I recommend HostGator.

Now, I’ve played with both in the past but over the last 2 weeks I’ve experienced the quick power of both. Why the switch you ask?

Well, don’t get me wrong, GoDaddy is a good company. In my opinion, their customer service for the newbie is unsurpassed. However, here’s what put me over the edge and has me converted to NameCheap and Hostgator:

As some of you may know, my wife has a stand up paddle lessons school. Well, every month we organize a big cleanup where we invite anyone who wants to come, to paddle up the river and gather as much trash as we can from the riverbank and bushes, then bring it back down the river and throw it all away.

The event has been growing in popularity, and yesterday in the local paper, an article was printed announcing the next cleanup, which is this Saturday. The problem was, the article directed people to go to www.anahulucleanup.com for more information. I DIDN’T EVEN OWN THE DOMAIN NAME YET!

A few weeks ago, I registered some domain names with NameCheap and used Hostgator for the hosting, and I had a website live in about 10 minutes from domain registration to uploading the site. I was definitely impressed. Well, in a rush I decided to register the domain with NameCheap, then use my GoDaddy account for hosting. The domain registration and configuration went off without a hitch. Then, I went to GoDaddy to link the domain name to the hosting account hoping it would all come together quickly.

I submitted the request to GoDaddy, and quickly whipped up a crude website just to get something online. Everything was ready to launch and I was still waiting on GoDaddy! I waited at least an hour for it all to go through, and it never happened.

Fed up with waiting,  I canceled the request with GoDaddy, went into my HostGator account to add the domain to my hosting account, and shazzam! The site was live in about 2 minutes! Perfect. And, I was converted.

What does that all mean? If you don’t have the patience to wait on your domain or hosting account changes, like me, I recommend NameCheap to register your domains, and Hostgator for hosting. It’s quick, easy, and changes seem to happen instantly.

Hey, if you’re planning a product launch, you don’t want to be waiting on your hosting account or domain registrar make your site live. You need it now! You don’t have time to wait on www.GoDaddy.com to update all the necessary settings for your website.  Go with my new recommendations and you may save yourself a headache. Now I know why GoDaddy has to have good customer service.

On a side note, I also don’t agree with GoDaddy’s marketing plan and would have started moving my business elsewhere for just that. I found my new favorites just in time!

What would you pay for a list like that?

You can get one for FREE. How?

I’ll give you 3 words: AWeber, Facebook, Twitter

More at my workshop on Wed, Feb 17th 5:30-7:30pm in Honolulu, HI.
Get info and register online here.

You wouldn’t believe how many turn-key websites are lying around just waiting to be marketed online. Why don’t I market them myself? I simply don’t have the time. My attention right now is on my private marketing  and web design clients, and I don’t have time to market other websites. So, rather than letting them collect dust, if you want them, they’re yours. And I’m selling them off cheap!

How can learn what they are and get one?

You have to be on my Entrepreneur Hot List!

Last year, I launched the Entrepreneur Hot List and registration was open for only about a week before I closed it. It’s an exclusive list and has been closed ever since, until today!

Today I am opening up registration for the Entrepreneur Hot List, and for a limited time membership is FREE for my blog readers and those subscribed to my newsletter.

How can you join?

Go to www.entrepreneurhotlist.com.

If registration is still open and FREE, you’ll be able to sign up right there and get on the list.

Now, I have to get back to packing up these businesses for you!

Peace. . . I’m back to work.

For me, one of the most difficult decisions of all is deciding on a domain name for a new business of mine. Man, it seriously stresses me out sometimes. This is the domain name that you will be telling all of your friends, family, and business associates about. This little domain name will often be the first impression your customers will get about you before they even see your website. This is the domain name that you will be launching a serious marketing campaign around. And once a viral marketing campaign is underway, there’s no turning back.

I was thrilled when I got an email this morning from Network Solutions letting me know that they’re running buy one get one free sale on domain names! Now, instead of having to decide between the two finalists for a company web address, you can just register both and sleep on it without worrying that someone else might register the other one overnight.

Yep. Buy one domain and get one free. Pretty awesome. Anyway, here’s a banner that you can click on to get your free domain name. . .

eCover Created by eCover Generator

Hey gang! If you’ve been wondering how to make ebook covers, this is the blog post you’ve been waiting for. There’s a piece of software I’ve been using over the years that creates covers for my eBooks, digital audio files, and special reports. So, I thought I’d share it with you. It’s the same software I used to create the eCover to my audio book, “The Truth About Online Marketing: Confronting the Biggest Mistake” that you see to the left there.

This software creates eCovers for reports, books, software, and CDs. You upload the pictures or create them using the software, then you simply choose the size, angle, and shadow of the images. The software does the rest and “presto” you’ve got slick covers to your ebooks!

You don’t have to be a design genius to use it. The software was developed so that anyone can use it right away. After you get the software, you simply download the file, double click it to install it, and it’s ready to do the hard work for you.

What does this mean for your business? Well, first of all you don’t have to pay a graphic designer big bucks to make 3D images of your ebooks. And, secondly, now you can give a professional look to all the information you’re selling or giving away to your website visitors. The software is called eCover Generator. Enjoy!

Video 1

Video 2

Video 3

Video 4

And for additional Questions and Answers about it, visit http://ftc.gov/multimedia/video/business/endorsement-guides.shtm

As a gift through the holidays this year, Google has subsidized WiFi internet access at various airports across the country to help promote the new Google Chrome browser of which I, personally, am a fan. How much are they subsidizing the internet access? Well, it’s Free. I’m telling you, Google it taking over the internet world.

Well, Bing and Yahoo! have answered back. Bing has been keeping up with the Joneses by offer the same free internet service at other airports across the country, while Yahoo! has decided to wire up New York’s Times Square with free WiFi through the holidays. Boy, the search engine and browser battle is getting pretty heated, and it looks like Google is still the Jones to keep up with.