insight in high speed internet for rural areas, using drones or towers.

1. Get your funnel(s) down pat and automated. If all you're doing is sending a broadcast email to your list every few days, you're missing out. 2. Pay for targeted traffic. The List is the #1 factor in sales conversion: you can have mediocre copy, but if your list is spot on, you'll make sales. But if you have great copy and a lousy list, you won't make a dime. Stay away from solo ads/ad swaps. Buy access to lists of buyers, who have bought products like yours. Yes, these lists are available. Expect to invest $3K minimum to email them...but they are already opted in to the service's list, and they have already bought something similar or related to your product. Huge factor in conversion. 3. Develop joint ventures with online marketers who are bigger than you and have bigger lists in niches related to your current one. Yes you may only make 50% or 25%, but those are sales you'd never have made as easily as with this affiliate. Many people buy just because someone they trust and have a relationship with recommended the product...as you probably know. 4. Develop reputation and traffic from high traffic online sources like forums. Sell at those locations.

Advertising is one of the ways to get traction, but for most brands it takes over 6 months (or a year) to build any income at all. It's a good way to promote local stores or coffee shops, and cheaper products, but the cost per click is high for online products and the initial investment is significant, and often acquiring a customer costs more than profit. For some brands getting a large number of initial users is essential to get the business profitable at a later point. Many startups invest in different forms of inbound or content marketing and build their steady traffic from freebies, tutorials and other relevant resources for their users, referral programs, freemium models and other tactics to bring users without investing in standard advertising. Advertising is a helpful addition when you implement retargeting pixels and promote to the right channels.

If you want a system that doesn't require any hardware or infrastructure, then a virtual PBX is the best bet. These systems just use your existing phone numbers (cell phones or whatever) and routes the calls among them. The big player in this space is http://grasshopper.com/ They have been around for quite awhile and have a lot of features for managing calls. They're well known for their reliability and customer service. I've also used http://www.ringcentral.com/ and they are very good as well. Never had any issues and they support various softphones and hardware phones as well. I've also heard about a new up-and-comer https://aircall.io/ - But I know very little about them and they look to still be in beta. But you should definitely try it for comparison.

This can be tricky. Generally I recommend paying commissions on revenue-generation events only. The reason being, if it is free to generate a lead then it makes it really easy to take advantage of the system. That being said, there are some ways to go about it. Calculate (you should already have this) your cost of acquiring a lead (CAC). That's your baseline. You can now set your referral commission at or below that CAC number. Since you only pay a commission based on the generation of a new lead you guarantee a positive ROI. A prize/sweepstakes is not a bad idea. Make sure to create a prize that really resonates with your target demographic (YES: set of All-Clad pans, NO: an iPad) I would run the program the first time based on your best estimates; if you expect to generate 100 new leads, and would normally pay $10-$15/lead then you can afford $1,000-1,500 prize. You can then adjust the process during future iterations based on: 1) The quality of the leads you received. Referrals are generally more valuable, but scam/spam leads are not. 2) The number of leads you generated. If you want to work through details in your specific case let me know, I'd be happy to set up a call to discuss further. Good luck!

We use sprout social. They have a free tier and pretty complete. http://sproutsocial.com