I haven’t participated in a lot of conference calls, mostly because I do a lot of my communications via email. Also, more recently, I use Skype to make free long distance calls and for conferencing people from California to Australia. But lately, I have been checking out a number of free conference call applications  on the Web (that do require calling a TOLL number) and thinking about how they might help me in my business. Those apps include FreeConference.com, Rondee, and I’m also going to check out Palbee and DimDim.

In the last few weeks, I’ve actually been putting one of the applications - Calliflower - to use. I’ve been corresponding with several other women and doing some brainstorming and mutual pep talks as each of us try to take our careers and businesses to the next level. We have a lot of ideas for ways we can help one another as well as work together.

Email was just not sufficient for our “talks.” So we’ve set up a regular weekly conference call with the four of us. And if one of us can’t make it? Calliflower lets us record the call and save it as an MP3 file that we can access later if we missed the call.

How else can you take advantage of the free conferencing apps out there? Let me count the ways…

Using Conferencing Apps for Your Business

1. Advisory Board or Board of Directors calls. Some of the apps make it very easy to schedule recurring calls, emailing all your board members in advance with call-in instructions and reminders.

2. Holding teleseminars or webinars. Not all Web conferencing systems provide multimedia support so make sure you pick the right solution.

3. Recording podcasts by phone. If you don’t need a lot of post-production work, calling in a podcast using one of these apps that allows you to record MP3 files makes podcasting easy. Or you can try an audio recording solution like Utterz.

4. Offer consulting by conferencing app. Add pizazz to your phone consulting by using an app that allows you to embed presentation files, images, and links to enrich your offerings.

I still think that for the money, Skype rocks since you really can’t beat totally free. But don’t ignore the other solutions if you need something more robust and integrated for your conference calling needs.

What do you use for conference calls? For podcasting? For teleseminars or webinars?

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