My TalkFusion Adventure & Review 2010-2011

Posted in Earn Money Online, Hosting, Online Video Marketing

At the end of 2010 when I first heard about a video e-mail company called TalkFusion I was tired. Tired of looking into another ‘best next deal’-opportunity, cause there are many good ones out there! And although the compensation plan looked top notch, the video e-mail product was technically inferior to what I expected to be. Better said: if I would setup a video email system myself, I would have certain technical, design and usability standards, and I couldn’t recognise myself in them. I’m talking about ‘video buffering’ to guarantee a smooth playback, and Pro templates. Not the rather childish looking ones back then. They seemed fun to send out to mum and dad, but not to use as business tools. Thus I said “no thank you”.

Early February 2011 I got pitched for the 9th time about … TalkFusion, while having said no 8 times before, I actually said yes to my old-room mate from London UK. He was able to answer some of my burning questions, and showed me / cleared up some things I didn’t notice before. Really small ‘nerdy’ but — to me — relevant things. Can’t remember what exactly they were, but for some reason I was blown away. Decided to join at entry level, which — back then — was “executive”-package. Benefiting from ‘all 8’ tools. Oh … hold on. We didn’t have the excellent video conference and webcast software back then. And that was really the main reason (next to the compensation plan) why to sign up. So after 60days, I felt an illusion richer and left.

June 2011. Joined a second time based on the premise of being able to sign up on a powerleg of a new born team with exploding results (which turned out to be an empty promise). By this time the video email templates were of a quality, second to none. For 1 month didn’t really built the business, only used the product with the contacts in my firm as an video e-mail newsletter system. And I saw a new trend; didn’t matter what I sent out, customers remembered my brand and my video email!

When I did decided to built a team, and the person I was with didn’t leave up their promise I left. Plus I also felt the market had progressed to a point where there would be more video email competitors … for free that is. Boy was I wrong …

Competition?

In one word? None. For me Talk Fusion has 5 out of 8 very useful products. Let me explain you which ones, and what people think it ‘competes’ with …

1) video e-mail

2) video conferencing

3) video ‘blasting’

4) video opt-in

5) video webcasts

there are only 2 providers right now with a mature video e-mail system: Wowwe and vumail. Both inferior, because they don’t support a library consisting of 1000s of multilanguage templates. And while it’s possible to record from cam, but not to import from a library / harddrive, which is something you won’t appreciate until you don’t have it any longer.
After years of experimenting there’s only 2 webconference packages I really like: hotconference.com and anymeeting.com . The latter being free, but during the presentation the audience sees annoying ads. Worst case scenario? Of a competing product you are trying to promote durin the webinar. And while hotconference has a nice feature set, it doesn’t look pro. All the other default enterprise webconferencing packages like DimDim, WebEx, GotoMeeting, etc. are overpriced, come with a very poor feature set and roomsize limits. TF Videoconference has an unlimited roomsize. Yes you read that correct. Moreover TF allows you to STREAM video. Now please tell me what software allows you to do that? Do I hear you say “Ustream.TV”? Inferior in many ways. Not saying to make it look bad, but used to use it myself.
this is something I particularly LOVE. TalkFusion’s video email servers are white listed with 99% of ISPs (Internet Service Providers) Worldwide. Meaning there’s a very high certainty your message will reach it’s sender. But that’s not where it stops! You receive a confirmation of every viewed video e-mail. Thus you know — opposed to normal e-mail — when the messenger has SEEN your message. Of course you have to obey the spamlaws. But in my particular case … I have maillists of 10,000s of people. And while the default limit of my TalkFusion address book is 1000 addresses (which btw can be expanded for an extra fee), I prefer importing excel sheets with CSV data per 1000, deleting them again, and importing the next batch. Time consuming yes, but every effective. And if you don’t like that?
video-opt-in … that’s something you have to pay $100s for in a separate system. In the e-mail opt-in and auto responder world, there are 3 really big names: Aweber, GetResponse and MailChimp. The last one again — Mailchimp — being free when you remain under certain values. While I really love mailchimp, it tends to get rather expensive once your mailing lists grows. And Getresponse is the only provider which enables you to embed videos in an easy way.
Both Skype group calls, as well as the brand new Google+ offer webcasts, but is it limitted to 10 people tops. TalkFusion supports upto 25.
.. nah kidding, but did forget to mentioned something important. Something I didn’t fully get when I had my first look at TalkFusion. All products? Are brandable. Something you can do yourself, but you actually get 1-3 (depending on the package you buy) custom templates which do not contain — unless you want to — TalkFusion branding. You know how much designers costs these days? And TalkFusion has all of the above, at a price tag that almost seems insane!

How can they make it so affordable?

Due to business & marketing model they use … Multi Level marketing. One of the most misunderstood marketing ways on planet earth, but recently endorsed by Direct Selling Association in The Wall Street Journal. Yeah … the #1 business paper. And TalkFusion itself has been featured in a number of magazines and news broadcasts … Forbes for example. See: http://www.talkfusioninthenews.com/