Business cards aren’t just for business people anymore! Business cards for personal use (also known as calling cards) are a wonderful way to convey your personal contact information. With so many different ways to get in touch with people – home phones, cell phones, email addresses, instant messaging, faxes, snail mail addresses, personal websites, blogs, etc – communicating your contact information in an attractive and handy manner is essential part of communication. The great news is that personal calling cards are available in a variety of styles, so you can pass along your information in a way that best expresses your personality!

Here are 10 great ways to use personal calling cards:

Teachers can use calling cards to convey all of their contact information to their students and their parents by sending a calling card home on the first day of class with all of their vital contact information.

Whether you’re moving into a new home or you pack up for the winter for a warmer climate, calling cards are a great way to let everyone know all of your new contact information. Calling cards are great for new college students as well!

Parents of children with serious medical conditions or allergies can spell out their child’s health conditions on a calling card (i.e. what the child is allergic to, medications, etc). Parents can also explain how to handle a medical emergency (i.e. who should be contacted, the pediatrician’s name, insurance information, etc.)

Recently married couples can use a calling card to let everyone know where they will reside and what their new married name is. For women keeping their maiden name or hyphenating their name with their husband’s, it is helpful to spell this out on a calling card. Calling cards can be enclosed with the thank you cards from the wedding.

Party organizers can use calling cards to enclose with shower invitations to detail registry information for expectant mothers or brides.

Coaches can score the “winning play” by use calling cards to pass on all of their contact information to players and their parents.

Mommies who are involved in a lot of activities and play dates can use personal calling cards to express their contact information to everyone they meet.

Throwing a party? Enclose a calling card with party invitations to let guests know when and how to RSVP for your next party.

Use calling cards as an enclosure card with your next gift. You could personalize the gift with text like, “A gift from Ashley Simpson”.

Calling cards are great to pass out to all of the contacts you meet during volunteer activities and civic and community organizations.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some great ways to use calling cards to communicate your personal information.

The entire telephony structure has undergone a tremendous change with globalisation shrinking the size of the world. Communication is no longer restricted to picking up the receiver of your fixed line telephony and making a call which would end up costing you a heavy amount. With VoIP telephony coming into the picture the very way communication was perceived has changed. IP telephony or VoIP sends voice which is in analog signal format over the internet to the destination by converting it into small digital IP packets. These digital packets are then reconverted into analog format(your voice) before they reach the final destination.

VoIP, by taking the help of Internet, has revolutionised the entire communication structure. It has brought along many value added services which prove to be extremely cost efficient to the business houses. This profit in terms of savings can be further transferred to the end customers by enhancing the service with different features.

Take for instance calling cards. The number of people opting for calling cards has been increasing exponentially. Reason for this is simple enough. Calling cards offer a cheap method of making long distance international calls and that too with great ease. There is no commitment. You make calls for worth the cost of your calling card. Once you have utilised the minutes that the card offered you can buy another card. Also calling cards help you save big money unlike your long distance provider who charges monthly tariff for making long distance calls. With prepaid calling cards you only pay for what you have used.

International Calling Card Market

The easiest and the best way to leverage from this value added service would be to utilise the calling card platform provided by certain premium VoIP service providers. Instead of stepping into the international calling card market by investing a large capital and thereby increasing the level of risk, you can benefit by exploiting their ready-to-use calling card platform.

With no investment and minimum operating cost, expanding your business with phone cards would prove to be a cool breeze for you. The platform ideally provides you an easy way to generate and manage PINS. A good service provider would ideally provide you with personalised access numbers and online billing portal.

One thing is for sure, that by utilising the platform of long distance phone cards would help rise your business to a higher level, by considerably elevating your revenue generation in a short span of time.

“Order Now!” “Your Business Will Fail If You Don't Have This New Technology!” “Your Competition Has This Tool, Why Don't You?” Does any of this sound familiar? Does it make you cringe? It seems to be impossible to keep up with all the new trends in business today. It's hard to know which trends are just flash in the pan gimmicks and which are valuable tools that your business can actually benefit from. It's important to do your research. Find out what these tools can do for you and make sure it is right for your business. One of these recent trends is the hosted PBX service. These “virtual” phone systems can automatically answer, screen and route all incoming calls to your office, home and/or cell phone. Although they have been on the market for some time now, hosted PBXs have recently been getting the attention of more and more small and medium sized businesses. Is this technology right for your business?

What Can It Do For Me?
First you have to ask yourself, “How will my business benefit from a hosted PBX?” A hosted PBX service has many different aspects that a business owner can take advantage of. A good service will have numerous different features and packages that can help your business project a more professional image and boost productivity. Here are 4 basic features of most hosted PBX services. See if they can benefit your business.

1 - 800 - Toll Free Number
90% of Americans report using a toll free number and studies show that using a toll free number in your advertising can increase your response by 30%. So the first advantage to your business using an “800” number with your hosted PBX is that consumers will call you before they call the company with a local number. If your company only does business in your direct local market, and you want to keep it that way, then you may still benefit from a toll free number. People generally see a company with a toll free number as a larger and more established business. Simply by having a toll free number, you boost your professional image and instill confidence in your callers.

You Got Them To Call, Now Answer The Phone!
“Follow Me” call forwarding is the backbone of a hosted PBX service. If you have a toll free number you're inviting people to call you. With follow me call forwarding, you can route calls that come into your hosted PBX to any local phone number or numbers you wish. You can have calls transferred to your office phone, home phone, cell phone or any combination of these numbers until the service finds you. You can even program a hosted virtual PBX to call different phone numbers at different times of the day, or even days of the week. The system will announce itself to you so that you know it is a call coming from your toll free number. Most importantly you can be available to your callers wherever you go. You don't have to worry about missing a call from Mr. Next Big Client while you are out to lunch. Or better yet, you don't have to miss your lunch because you are waiting for Mrs. Big Client to return your call.

Connecting You and Your Team
Multiple voicemail boxes can play an important part in how your hosted PBX directs callers. If you have multiple employees, you can assign each one their own mailbox. Each mailbox acts as its own voice mail system. It comes with its own extension, outgoing voicemail message, call forwarding settings, and delivery of messages. The hosted PBX service automatically answers all incoming calls and directs the caller to press the extension of the person they would like to speak to or give them the option of listening to a list of extensions. It doesn't matter if all your employees work in the same office or in different offices in different locations. They can even work out of their own homes and the caller will never know they are being transferred anywhere outside of the office. If you are a one man band, but you want to project the image of a small orchestra, this can be achieved using your multiple voicemail extensions. For example you can create a mailbox for a Sales department, Technical Support department and Billing department. A hosted PBX system will automatically answer all your incoming calls and route callers to the appropriate department. Unbeknownst to the caller, all three extensions are transferred to you at your local number. With multiple mailboxes you can create an image of a single office as well as further project that professional image that you started by having a toll free number.

Your Voice System At Your Fingertips
One of the advantages of having a voip PBX is having your entire voice system at your fingertips. Web based access provides a window to your system giving you real time control of your communications. Features will vary depending on the company, but most web based applications allow you to control each mailbox on your system, view caller id captures, change system and mailbox settings such as call forwarding numbers and times as well as running reports to view call usage and trends. Another advantage of web based access is the ability to check voice and fax messages online or have them sent to any email address you wish. Of course, you can still check your messages by phone as well. Web based access isn't just a convenient and time saving tool, it is also a very productive one. For example you could run a report to see if the call volume increased after a specific ad campaign was released or see which day of the week is the busiest for customer service. The applications are endless.

When trying to decide if the latest tools are right for your business, make sure to ask the important questions. How will it benefit me and my business? Will it boost my productivity? Will it increase my professional image and boost customer confidence? Will it help me to be more successful? If the answer is “yes” to any of these questions then it is definitely a tool that you need to look into integrating into your business.

Are you running a business where members of your company are in different parts of the country or world at different times? This makes it extremely difficult to hold conferences whenever you want, unless you want to fly all of the people in. The solution to this problem is conference calls and here are some tips to help you have a successful conference over the phone:

-The thing you must first do to set up a successful conference call is to tell the participants you want in the call the toll-free number they will be calling, the code they must enter to get into the conference, the agenda of the meeting, and most importantly, the time they are to call in. The company you sign up under will provide you with your own 800 toll free number that you will use. All the participants will be allowed to choose their own entry code so that they can enter it when they are ready to join the conference. The reason an agenda is important before starting the conference is so you can stay on track and get the most out of the meeting.

-Before you do the tip above you should make a list of all the people you are going to want to participate in the call. This will help you when it comes time to send out all the information as you will already know who to send the information to and you will know what to send them. You should also consider that participates are going to be all over the country or world in different time zones so try to find a time that the most amount of members can participate.

-This may be one of the most important tips and that is you must start the conference calls on time! The participants are all going to make special arrangements to call in on time so you must start it on time. If you do not start the conference on time you will have to deal with a big mess that can be avoided easily.

-Tell all participants to use the mute button when they are not talking to the members of the conference. This helps to eliminate all the background noise that can become a distraction while the others are either talking or listening.

These are just some tips that I have found to be helpful when using conference calls.