What is the average price?

"What is the average price to 'buy' a toll free number from an existing customer?" That sounds like simple enough question. Unfortunately it's not like your house. There is no book value or market rate that you can look up like you can a house or a car. The value of a toll free number is much more subjective, meaning it depends on how it's used by the current owner as well as how it could be used by the purchaser or other potential purchasers.

When a number is only really important to one buyer it becomes even more depedent on what they want or think about it. That is especially true for company names that don't mean very much to anyone else. Generic terms can be measured more against other transactions than fanciful names.

The best advice I can give to someone trying to pursue this is to take your time, because if you're in a hurry and try to go to fast it make you look more desperate and gives the other party the upper hand in the negotiations. And you also have to go into it with the realization that your goal is to make a friend as much as anything else. Picture if a friend of yours from school found out that you had a number and he wanted to start a business around it. You'd almost certainly sell it to him for a fraction of what you'd try to get from a large company. So don't come into this with a big company attitude, just try to make a friend and take your time. Unfortunately we don't always have time, but at least knowing that may help a little.

The other thing that makes that a very hard question to answer is that you really have to do all of the work to complete the deal just to be sure what it will ultimately cost you and if they'll ultimately go through with it and be willing to sell it to you. That fact, plus the fact that there's no centralized list of transactions the way there is in real estate or cars for instance makes it very hard to answer that question.

I also like to tell people that when you only need one successful deal, the odds really don't matter very much. If you needed to close 10 deals then the closing rate would be relevant, but if you only want one number and therefore need to close just one deal the odds don't matter. It's like asking a girl out or to marry you. You only need to get one good one so t doesn't matter how many said no in the end or if the first one says yes. You just keep looking until you find the right one. You don't need to find 10 right partners, just one. Hopefully at least one at a time, anyway.

Converting out site to Joomla

I'm looking for soeone to do the conversion of our site into Joomla. I'm posting the following requirements on Elance, but if anyone has any suggestions outside of that, please contact me directly.

We need to convert TollFreeNumbers.com from static pages to a CMS system to allow us to grow and maintain things better. After discussing the options with some people we have concluded that Joomla is the best way to go.

So we need someone to help convert our existing website to Joomla.

* It's very important to keep the existing navigation and search header which is already handled seperately as a header that get added with an include command which should make that relatively simple.
* We need to add a new blog (started recently on blogger) and need to add that to the home page.
* We need to add a site map (which will need to be expandable to include our search results pages which are being converted into static html links soon)
* We need to add a related links directory structure and user review system (jReviews?)
* We have a Vbulletin forum which we would like to migrate and/or update if possible.
* All of our traffic comes from search rankings which are already good but we always need to continue to improve.
* We have several dozen pages but we could only convert the main ones converted or you could do all of them. We can convert additional pages if necessary.
* We would like to add a database that we can display numeric numbers available, rather than using static pages which make updating difficult.
* No commerce or affiliate program necessary. Those already exist and don't need to be changed.
* We don't use videos no but may want to include a system to add that in the future.

I didn't specify a budget because we will consider working on an hourly basis rather than a project basis if that is easier. Please let me know what would work best.

It's also important to see some of your joomla projects. Please also let me know what interesting or unique features you included. I'd like to see your creativity.

Also anyone that submits a bid can have any "Available" toll free number for free. If you use our website to find a number that would be helpful to your business, I'll not only give it to you for free, but it will show that you understand the purpose of our site and that you took the time to go through it and will raise you to the top of the bidders.

Email bounces on the rise

I read a lot of Clickz and I definitely see the results of this article about "The Rise of Aggressive Bounce Rates". It's a very short article but we see this happening quite a bit. http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3624656

We constantly have to resend our Toll Free Manual to customers, partially because some just overlook or lose it, but many just never seem to see it.

There really is no answer. Email just isn't any where as reliable as it used to be. But at least I feel better that it's not just a problem with us, but it's a growing problem for everyone. I currently get 4 to 5 thousand spams per day, but have several excellent filters and don't miss much or bother with very much spam any more. But it's making everyone raise the bar and it's costing their customers some very legitimate emails.

We support children in Ukraine

Most of my posts are directly related to toll free numbers, but I wanted to share something else that we're involved in. Some friends of my wife and I, run the Brenna Engle Foundation which helps underprivileged children in Lutsk, Ukraine.

The conditions for the poor in Ukraine make the poor in the US look rich. Rich and Donna live in Poughkeepsie but run a small home for several children who have parent (they're not orphans) but the parents aren't able to support them. Four or five children from 5 to 16 year old live in this small home connected to a church, which runs a program to feed 50 to 75 children per day. For many of them it's their only hot meal and they have a variety of bible study and church activities for them.

My wife Karen is leaving in a few days to go over with several people, to help out with a variety of things there for about two weeks. They will post information about the trip and pictures at http://brennaenglefoundation.blogspot.com/.

I think most people really like to help others, but so often it's hard to do something really tangible since your support has to get funneled through a large organization. That is fine, and often the only way to help in many situations. But it's also very nice to find something small that really makes a direct difference in a few live too. That's what I really like about this. I know the people involved and know that all the support goes right to the people who need it and appreciate it so much. It really makes a difference and I'm glad to share this and be a part of it.

Releasing & Protecting your #

At TollFreeNumbers.com we try to do a better job of releasing toll free numbers, or processing the transfer requests than anyone else in the industry. Most other phone companies drag their feet but we put a higher priority on this than even new orders and usually process all requests the same day we receive them, usually within a couple hours. We also release them in real time when carriers call and ask us to. That's because it's really the whole idea of our service is to bring the number to another carrier for the ongoing service.

We also have to protect our customers more than most other carriers. Our customers come to us to get numbers that are very important to them and they are often very valuable. So we have to protect our customer's numbers, and even the identity of our customers. We don't give out the customer information in any form without their consent.

We also don't allow other phone companies to yank numbers from us without providing an appropriate resporg change form or the correct customer information. Our customers give us the authority to yank numbers back if they are taken without verifying that they were taken by the correct party. We are very quick to release numbers but we also can't allow any numbers to be taken without providing the appropriate information to us.

I just thought I'd mention this because we had a phone company yank a number from us yesterday and we are happy to release them asap, but can't allow anyone to simply take numbers without being able to confirm that they are being taken appropriately. Most of the time if the name doesn't match, there is a valid reason and with some communication it can easily be resolved. But we are also here to protect our customers numbers so please respect that and we'll be happy to work with you as much as possible.

Telecom & Law enforcement reps

We've really only had the signup process available for the secure lookup that shows the phone company responsible for a couple days but it has been very exciting and interesting to see the variety of phone company representatives and law enforcement people that requested this access.

I've always said that my goal is to be a valuable resource to the industry. But it's really cool seeing people from the Paypal fraud department to the U.S. Secret Service signing up for it, not to mention the variety of phone company representatives.

New and Improved Dates

Did you ever have a conversation that started with "What if...." with a computer programmer? I have these occasionally with our main programmer, Bud Jay. We had a lot of fun and we wound up combining several what ifs and wound up with some great progress.

We not only fixed the dates but we wound up coming up with a way to collect a much more useful date. The dates we show now are the dates of the last change. We're not showing the original date it was set up any more like we used to. We're showing the date of the last change. That may not sound like much of a difference, but it really is much more helpful because it essenially shows you if anyone is paying attention to it.

When you see a number with a date of several years ago, that goes to a disconnect message, that's a huge sign that the number may be stuck or buried in their system. Mark Olson used to call them stranded numbers. They are worth pursuing, so get the phone company and call them. I'm also going to prepare something to explain how to talk with the phone company and get the information you need from them. There will probably be more information about this on the Vanity Lookup page, but these new dates are great!