Easy Ways To Contact Family And Friends Over The Holidays
Many people start to come alive around Thanksgiving. The holiday excitement is in the air and lasts well until after New Years Day. As well as being one of the most appealing times of the year, it can be one of the most stressful times of the year.
Getting in touch and spending time with family and friends is an important part of the holidays. Inevitably, someone will not make it home for the holidays. It seems getting everyone home under the same roof at the same time is next to impossible.
Getting in touch with you loved ones during the holidays does not need to be a hard task. With today’s technology it is easier than ever. Today’s technology isn’t necessarily hard on the pocketbook either.
Some ideas that you can use to make the keeping in touch easier and more affordable are as follows:
1. Setup a Personal Toll-free 800 number to get in touch with family and friends.
Making a call to a toll-free number is not a new idea. Toll-free numbers are popular with businesses because it is an easy device for their customers to reach them. Toll free numbers can do the same thing for you in keeping in touch with loved ones.
The personal toll-free number a friend has used for the last three years only charges me $2.00/month for the number and it is only 2.5 cents per minute for the call. Loved ones can always approach you, even from a payphone.
You can even get a stand alone toll-free service that will allow you to forward the toll-free number to a cell phone, home phone, work phone, or any other number. You can even change the forwarding on the fly. The best part about a stand-alone provider is that you don’t have to switch carriers.
2.Try a BIG family conference call. Conference calling is very convenient especially when you need to speak with lots of people from two or more locations.
The way it works is you call to setup your account and you are given a toll-free 800 number and a unique PIN code to your account. Then you invite everyone to the conference call by giving them the time, toll-free number, and PIN code to your conference.
These work great in a family get-together or a holiday gathering to get in touch. Everyone gets to hop on the phone and talk to everyone else at the same time. That method you don’t have to take the time to call each person separately. It really saves time.
3. Give VoIP a try! VoIP is a phone service that works over your broadband internet connection. VoIP eliminates the middle man in the phone game. Almost all long distance companies nowadays route all of their calls over the Internet.
A VoIP provider only charges around $19.99 per month for unlimited calling to anywhere in the USA and Canada.
You acquire all the standard calling features like like voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, three-way calling, call forwarding, 7 digit local dialing, etc.
4. To make calling over the holidays even more fun, add video to your calls.
One of the really cool gadgets out true now is video conferencing. Imagine talking face to face with people who can’t make it home for the holidays. Their service for unlimited video calling is about the same, $19.99/month. All you need is a broadband internet connection and a special phone with the camera built-in.
The video phone is really frosty and affordable. You can usually get one for around $100 depending on their promo. Who knew that video calls could be so affordable? If you are comfortable using the computer you can also use free software to have group video conferences. Programs like Skype and most instant messengers from Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL support video.
There are a lot of ways to stay connected out there. Like anything in life if you take a little bit of time to plan and look around you will find something easy that will manufacture life more enjoyable. Hopefully this gave you ideas that will give you a great starting place for your holiday planning.
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Filed under Free Internet Conference Call by on Jan 26th, 2012. 