It has been a great year here at Grasshopper. We made some pretty significant changes at the company (you may recall the GotVMail to Grasshopper re-brand) and are looking forward to many more improvements in 2010.

One of our big initiatives this year was the addition of the Grasslands blog. Launched in September, the response has been terrific. We are always looking for new ways to help entrepreneurs and the blog has provided us with an additional means to do so.

In case you weren’t here when the blog launched, we thought we’d fill you in with the…

Many of the customers who use our Virtual PBX service are entrepreneurs starting out in a 1-2 person operation, working out of their homes or even their cars. They have created a virtual office for their business.

There are plenty of articles out there on creating a virtual office but there are not very many on what to do once you have done so. Working in the place you live can lead to unhappiness, burnout and tension at home. However, it can be an ideal situation if you properly balance life & work responsibilities.

Here are three tips for creating a work/life balance in your virtual office:

#1 – Create Boundaries

Set Up an Area Specifically for Work

Having a dedicated area will help you remember that there needs to be a separation between work and the rest of your life. Whether it’s an office in the house, a spare bedroom or a certain corner of the kitchen table, make sure that spot is where work takes place and nothing else.

As most people know, Grasshopper is a virtual phone system designed for entrepreneurs and small businesses. We have tons of great features (if we do say so ourselves), including call forwarding, unlimited extensions, voice mails delivered to your email and more. Our most popular feature is, of course, toll free numbers.

Toll free numbers can be extremely valuable to a business when they are looking to project a professional image, sound bigger or just give their customers an easy phone number to remember. 800, 888, 877 and 866 numbers from Grasshopper have helped tens of thousands of small businesses grow over the past six years and will continue to do so in the future.

How do I choose the right toll free number for my business?

Thanks to a little free time over Thanksgiving, I was able to tackle my massive pile of “to-be-read” books over the holiday. First on the list was Adam Penenberg’s “Viral Loop”.

In it, Penenberg discusses the viral nature of today’s Web 2.0 success stories. As a precursor, he examines some historical case studies to demonstrate that viral marketing has been around a lot longer than most people think. Who knew Tupperware, the famed brand responsible for housing people’s leftovers, was the first to employ the tactic. They recruited thousands of women after World War 2 to host Tupperware parties and had the host act as a direct sales rep for the brand.

By motivating each hostess with a financial incentive for the success of each party, Tupperware was able to mobilize an entire army of housewives, pushing their brand to millions.

While this may seem like a no-brainer for some, it’s actually a common question!

“How do I dial a vanity number on my Blackberry?” 

If you don’t know what a vanity number is, it is a custom phone number (toll free or local) that spells out a particular word. Here are a few examples:

• 1-800-Flowers
• 1-800-Contacts
• 1-888-BestBuy

So, how exactly do you go about dialing a vanity number on your Blackberry?

Well you could try to figure out what letter corresponds to what number, or you could simply hold down the ALT key. That’s it!

By holding down the ALT key, you can dial every letter on the keyboard, spelling out any number you need, including your Grasshopper vanity number!