Online Fax Services Review

So when starting your business online more than likely you will have to fax something somewhere.  Normally just to incorporate your business you’ll need to fax the right documents if you are using some online service (I used ActiveFilings).   For some of us, including myself, we don’t have a fax machine or hardwired phone line at our disposal and thus need an alternative.  Hince my hunt for a good online fax service.  While there are a bunch of services I will review three here that I think solve different problems pretty well.

faxZero is dead simple and fast.  It requires no sign up and actually lets you send faxes for free.  There are two options Free Fax and Premium Fax.  With the free fax option you can send up to 3 pages, twice a day for free.  The catch is that the cover page has a huge advertisement on it, so I wouldn’t use it for anything important.  The premium fax option allows you to send up to 15 pages for $1.99, which considering the our other services is a good deal as long as all your faxes are between 11 and 15 pages.

Fax It Nice offers three options.  The first is a quick fax service like faxZero’s premium service except it costs $4.99 for up to 10 pages, so it’s not that good a deal.  The next two options you have to sign up for and one lets you just send faxes and the other lets you send and receive faxes.  Neither of these two have a monthly fee, they charge by the page at a starting rate of $0.18/page and it gets lower if you buy more pages ahead of time.  You get a free number with the send and receive service while just the sending service lets you fax from your email.  You can also send fax’s from the website itself.

Rapid Fax is a monthly fee service that starts at $7.95/month.  While a similar service eFax may be more popular, Rapid Fax does everything they do for less.  At the first payment tier you get 150 free pages a month and are charge $0.09/ extra page.  You receive a free toll free number and the faxes are converted and sent to your email where you can also send faxes from.  Rapid Fax even provides a cool little Microsoft Office plugin for a ‘send to fax’ option.

So, these are three different services that can each fill a different niche depending on your circumstances.  For me I never need to recieve faxes, only send out a few a month, and those few are important, so I choose to use Fax It Nice.

How Twitter Can Make Money / Earn Revenue

Now that Twitter has gone along the route of hiring someone to come up with their business model, I might as well give mine.  I’ve broken my ideas down into four main parts organized from most important/profitable/realizable to least.

Twitter Enteprise
 - The benefits of microblogging has been known to corporate intranets for a while now and their success was only solidified by Yammer winning TechCrunch50.  I am sure that Twitter has known of Yammer and microblogging for corporations already however any reasons for deciding against this commercial development should be relooked at.  Yammer has shown a working business model, though they are still small and have an even smaller name, two things that Twitter does not suffer from.  Google’s first source of revenue was selling search to corporate intranets, this industry has not changed as an area ripe for innovation.

Real Time Feed / Status Updates for Communities
 - Twitter can provide a  ”status update and news feed in a box”  feature to community sites.  Facebook has already shown success in their status updating and news feed features (albeit after tweaking) and other smaller communities will be looking to implement similar competing services.  This same idea was done by Meebo when Facebook implementing chat.  Meebo created a instant messenging in a box service for communities become the defacto solution.  Twitter can take this route as well.

Twitter News
- CNN has already shown they trust Twitter and the value it brings to their newsroom.  Speaking with CNN and other newsrooms would show what they might want in a seperate Twitter for the newsroom.  By learning what features they value a commercial service can be created.

Twitter Content
- Twitter produces incredible amounts of information that can be organized in to popular destination sites.  Probably the best type of site would be ones focusing on an individual such as a celebrity or sports star.  The point is to create pageviews on sites controlled by Twitter that can generate ad revenue. 

These are my ideas, any one have others?

Diversification of Music Marketing

The point is to get your music out there from seemingly legitimate sources.  You want people to hear your name and music from as many different sources as possible and online, a blog is a source along with Myspace, Facebook, Last.FM, and other music portals; they are all difference sources.  

It is more powerful for a person to hear your music from three different sources than three times from the same source.  Taking it a step further, I would say it is more powerful to hear of a song from multiple places garnering mediocre fame than it is to see a song garnering awesome fame from one source three times.  Let’s take it another step further going offline.  Let’s consider a  freind as a source, this means that three different friends still counts as one source.  I would go as far to say that hearing a song from three different online sources is better than hearing about it from three friends.  Many of you won’t agree.  

A friend while they have gained your trust and probably have things in common with you is still just one persons opinion and we know this.  Even if three of our friends say a movie was good, we can still go see and think it sucked, this has happened to many of us.  Now if a popular blog says a song is good, it is voted in the top ten at a Digg for music, and is one of the most downloaded songs at a music portal then the song will have more social proof then the former situation.  Social proof is the most important factor for a song’s initial success.  

This idea of marketing diversification can be applied to plenty of things, not just music.

Producing, Marketing, Distributing, and Selling a Physical Product Online

This post is to show what I did to create the Official MikesMoves Instructional Hip Hop Dance DVD.  It was my first experience in selling something physical online and I stumbled my way through it to the end, but came out alright.

Production
FIrst I had to actually shoot the DVD and edit it.  This took a loooong time, at least the editing did.  The shooting of the DVD was done on a school camera that I checked out in two days in one of our dance rooms.  The editing was done on campus in our computer lab on Macs using FInal Cut Pro.  This was a horrible experience.  First I hate Macs, second I hate Macs.  The process took about a month of steady work almost everyday.  Throughout the experience I was forced to learn Final Cut Pro, iDVD, and VirtualHub.  This learning curve among other things forced me to start over once and gave me plenty of set backs.  But I dredged on until finally out popped an .iso.  I promise you I would not have been able to do this without the constant help from the lab attendants.  I am no novice to searching online in tutorials, websites, and random forum posts for help but this might have broken me.  

Marketing
In the beginning I wanted marketing to be through MikesMoves, AdWords, and online retailers like Amazon and Buy.com.  MikesMoves was easiest to set up, since it was just another page on the site.  The retailers were a different event.  I started with Amazon and ponied up the $39.95 for one month to insert my own DVD in the catalog. The are no upfront costs to sell items already listed in Amazon.  The problem with Amazon was that I could not figure out how to get my DVD to show up high in the search results I wanted.  That month I sold 0 on Amazon, since nobody could find my DVD.  I probably could have looked harder around the net to try to solve this problem, and I probably will later, but at the time I was fed up with Amazon and cancelled after the first month.  
Along with Amazon I tried Buy.com, which luckily didn’t have a set up fee but however did require a UPC (the little barcode number on every product).  After some research I found out the legit way to get a unique UPC was to sign up for some membership and pay around $300-$500 a year.  This would not do.  The non-legit way, also the route I took, was to buy a not very unique UPC for $25.  UPC’s are split into two parts, the first part is unique to the registered company, the second part is unique to the product.  Basically I was paying for the second part.  So after all of that I ended up getting rejected from Buy.com for some reason that I have yet to figure out.  
In contingency with these methods I was running an AdWords campaign.  I quickly learned that DVD’s simply don’t have great absolute margins.  They have very good relative margins, mine is around 70%.  However this amounts to a little over $10.  Let’s assume you are doing CPC campaign, your landing page has a conversion rate of 2% and profit per sale is $10.  That means 1 person out of every 50 that come to your site will buy.  At zero-profitability that means you can only pay 20 cents per click and 20 cents is normal sometimes even low depending on the keywords.  It is true that if you can get really specific keywords then you won’t have to pay as much but then you just might not get enough people searching for your product to begin with.  And let’s not forget this 20 cents is for zero-profitability meaning you have to pay less than that to actually make anything.  It’s tough for a DVD.  However the experience really did get me in the mindset of finding products to produce with large absolute margins, which is good for the future.  I now have a campaign running and it works, I just suffer from low search numbers due to specific keywords.

Distribution & Selling
I distribute both a physical version of the DVD and an electronic version.  The physical one sells more and has higher absolute margins.  The electronic version is sold using bytecommerce, which is a great service.  It integrates with paypal and just works.  When it came to distributing the physical DVD I was a couple months fresh off reading The 4 Hour Work Week and instantly started looking for DVD fullfilment companies.  I found one that I like mostly because it was the only one that does everything from packing, labeling, shipping, and everything else per order rather than me have to accrue inventory, though I created the actual cover art.  The only problem was they sucked.  They just didn’t follow through (I think it was a one man show, but without a motivated one man).  So with my pride tucked away I turned to burning and shipping the DVD’s myself which is actually not as bad as I thought it would be.  I pay for and print out the shipping labels through paypal, burn and print the DVD and insertion slip from my laptop and ship USPS at my school.  I buy the packaging at USPS using a paypal debit card.  

So I don’t think I left anything big out but yeah, that’s how I am selling my DVD.   I won’t produce another one again due to plenty of reasons listed above but it gave me great insight into a number of business development mechanics.  Probably sometime in the future I’ll end up switching to having an inventory and letting a fulfillment company handle that, as well as sell on Amazon again, but for now I am happy.