It has a range of services (remember it’s in beta) available but the one that interests me most is the ability to sign up and get an ether phone number which you can make available to readers to call. It will forward to your home phone and those that call it will be charged whatever consulting rate that you set.
You set your rate, set your hours of accepting calls and they handle the rest.
ether take 15% of your income from the call and handle all the credit card costs, call costs etc.
They also have two other services that I’m sure will appeal to some bloggers also:
1. They have a method for selling digital content which I think some bloggers will find useful for selling special reports, e-books etc.
2. They have a similar service to selling content on the web but it’s email based.
I’ve been contacted by a number of companies over the last 6 months who are developing services like this one so I expect to see more in the year ahead (disclaimer: ether could have been one of these companies – I’ve done interviews with a few now and I can’t find their names!).
This is something I’d be very interested in using here on ProBlogger as I do have quite a few requests for consulting work each week and one of the problems has always been the logistics of it all.
So far the beta test is invitation only – if I get one I’ll give it a go and let you know how it works. You can put your name down to be notified when they accept more testers at their site.
Found via TechCrunch
update: My only suggestion would be that they enable calls to be booked as I like to have a schedule for the day ahead of time.
