If you run an office or purchase your own office supplies, you probably know how expensive they can get. Fortunately, the Web 2.0 era has produced a number of online services that can help us save a little money while still maintaining a superior level of quality. Let me show you some examples.

Business Cards:

Business cards are a necessity for every real estate agent, mortgage broker or any other professional business man or woman. The problem, is that they can get pretty costly, especially if you are having them designed and printed, but there are some alternatives:

• Most business cards are designed with an image editing and creation program called Photoshop. I own this particular program and can tell you with certainty that it is very expensive, much more than what a casual/light user would want to spend. There is however, a free online alternative that has most of the “necessary” alternatives and that is Pixlr. You can cut out the design costs buy creating them yourself with this free online program.
• Now I know that some of you are thinking I am crazy, because there is just no way that you could possibly design your own business card, right? Well not really. There are a number of free business card .psd templates that can be used in conjunction with Pixlr above, for example this one, this one and this one.
• If you aren’t finding a template that you like, you could use some of the available photoshop tutorials to make your own. For instance, this tutorial as well as this one and that one will help get you started. Don’t forget to do a google search to find some more, there are plenty great business card tutorials out there.
• If designing your own in photoshop still isn’t the way you want to go, you can use a free card creation service like Business Card 2 or Snapily.
• Once you have the perfect business card all made up, you might as well get it some free exposure over at The Card Board.

Schedules and Appointments:

We get it, you’re busy! That doesn’t make it ok that you just miss an appointment or loose track of your day to day schedule. You guessed it, there are some pretty neat services and tools to help with this area to, check them out:

• If you are as bad at remembering your daily tasks as I am, you’re in trouble. Thankfully, there are a lot of online services that specialize in task management. Some popular online task managers include Remember the Milk, Todoist, Hi Task, Task Freak, Nozbe and Toodledo.
• Services like Appointy allow you to not only manage, but also schedule appointments for your business.
• For many of us, keeping our co-workers informed about where we are at and what we are doing is near impossible. Usually a quick text message or Twitter status update will suffice, but if not you might consider using Yammer, Identa.ca or Status.net.

Online Marketing:

This is a pretty expansive topic and I am not even really to sure where I should start. The problem with marketing is that it gets really expensive, really quickly. Many large corporations spend millions of dollars a year just in marketing their products or services online. Thanks to the web 2.0, we can market our own businesses online without spending a dime and still get great exposure.

I should mention that there are a number of great link building articles right here on Geek Estate, example 1, 2 and 3. There are also a lot of free resources online that you can use to market your business. Let me give you some ideas:

• Many real estate agents are utilizing the high traffic, high visibility web 2.0 community sites such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Linked In and the others. Building a profile is easy, its keeping track of your profiles that can get difficult, but don’t worry, there are free services for that to.
• There are some great services geared towards real estate that allow you to build links and followers. Some of them allow you to setup your own blog, my favorites being Trulia, Zillow, ActiveRain and RealTown.
• Once you have become a blogging pro, you can get involved with the free real estate directories and forums, to socialize and build your brand. My real estate license website has a free real estate agent directory, no reciprocal link required. You could also visit Houselist and Just Real Estate. Agents Online and Real Estate Webmasters are both active forums that you can get started with.

Conference Calling:

I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid costly phone bills at all expenses. Maybe that’s why some of these services exist today:

• Free Conference
• Instant Conference
• Rondee
• Calliflower
• AccuTalk

What Online Services Have Simplified Your Life?

Believe me, I know that the web 2.0 service hasn’t even been broken with the above list, there are thousands more services and resources where these came from. Maybe I will save the others for another round-up of web 2.0 goodies, but for now, why not share the services that you are using these days!

I look forward to reading your comments below…

How Does a Linkwheel Work, Exactly? Well, they are actually quite simple. Picture a circle of web 2.0 properties surrounding your page. Each one of those properties not only adds link authority to the next property, but also to your webpage, creating a very powerful structure. You can change the websites that you use as often as you like. Using sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Blog.com and so forth to drive valuable link juice into your websites.

What is so Special About this Technique? When I first heard about a linkwheel I really wasn’t very impressed, to say the least. In fact, I had already been using a number of these web properties to build links for my websites anyways. It wasn’t until I started to hear talk of how well this particular technique worked at increasing serps that I my ears perked up a bit. There were a number of webmasters praising the method. They were making claims of top 10 positions and more traffic. So I decided to give it a shot, after all, what would it hurt? I instantly began a small linkwheel for a moderately competitive search term on a page that was already in position #163 for that term. I completed the linkwheel within a couple of hours and a week later I checked my results. After only using a small linkwheel and waiting a week, my page moved from #163 to #47 without doing anything else. That is pretty impressive for only a couple hours worth of work. Were I to use a larger linkwheel structure, I would have probably taken over the top 10 right away.

There is a lot of buzz going around the webmaster forums and I encourage you to look more into the creation and benefits of a linkwheel. This is certainly another great technique that every webmaster should have in their toolbox! Have fun building value for all of your online projects!

So I have already managed to teach you a lesson in link bait, what next! Well, there is a bit more to creating a viral article than a snappy title, you’re going to need great content too. The secret is creating compelling content with a title that triggers emotion or reaction within the reader. Try to make a reader laugh, scream, cry or question their own actions and you are well on your way towards creating killer content.

Alright, enough about link bait, we hear it all of the time and the term itself is disturbingly over used. Besides, there are so many other great ways to build links and market a real estate website without spending every waking moment trying to create an article that sells itself to people from all walks of life, right. So quick, grab a pencil and pad of paper because here are some of my favorite methods of link deployment:

1) Writing Guest Articles: You know, this “guest blogging” method used to be so talked about and now, ummm, not so much. There is a big nasty four letter word that causes people to overlook this idea, that word of course being “work”. That’s right, I read in the newspaper just the other day that some people may have been bitten by the lazy bug, a nasty little creature from some Scandinavian rain forest, I think. Hey, that’s alright though, because it leaves more opportunities for those of us willing to work for our food.

Why a guest author you may be wondering. Well, back when Google first printed an algorithm on stone tablets (many years ago), part of that algorithm was to place a higher importance on links that come from within any given pages content. Which means that when you write for old Joe Johnson, your friendly neighborhood real estate agent, and include links within the article, you are in fact building highly relevant links of considerable quality. Whew! That was a lot of explaining…

2) Linking to Other Websites: Somewhere along the path between link building and righteousness, some bad SEO prankster told people in the real estate industry that linking to other websites was a bad thing to do? It’s actually quite the contrary, in fact, when I first launch a new website, I link to all of my competitors. Why? Well, for the same reason people tell you not to link to sites that are in “bad neighborhoods”. Simply because Google will associate you with those websites in which you link to, which if course means that it only makes sense to tell Google that you are associated with all of the websites in the top 10 for your search term, right?

Were that reason not enough, consider this. Many bloggers have been strategically linking to other blogs within their industry for years in an effort to receive links in return. Guess what? It works! The other blogs often do link back, in essence boosting the authority of both websites.

3) Capitalize on Keyword Real Estate: No, not real estate as a keyword, keyword real estate! Have I taught you nothing thus far? Check out this well articulated article for a complete definition of what keyword real estate is and how it can benefit your website. In the meantime, let me give you the rundown.

With keyword real estate, we try to grab up all of the available web properties that we can use to link back to our website. For instance, let’s suppose that your main keyword is real estate license (to use mine as an example), that one hit’s close enough to home for me. So what we are going to do is try and setup as many free blogs, profile pages and websites we can using those keywords and in turn linking back to your own website, like this:
Squidoo.com/realestatelicense
Hubpages.com/hub/realestatelicense
Realestatelicense.blogetery.com
Are you beginning to understand where I am going with this? Excellent!

4) Turn your Blog into a Podcast: We always have to look for new venues to build links if you plan to get or stay ahead of the competition. As a blogger, podcasting directories would not ordinarily be an option for us, but it can be. Several services such as Odiogo.com will automatically convert your blog posts into podcasts. Now all you need to do is market your podcast throughout the thousands of podcasting directories and aggregator’s, have fun!

This is nowhere near a definitive list of link building ideas, but it does give you some ground to cover when you venture out to market your real estate website. Link building is all about creativity, you have to master the answer to “How can I get that site to link to me?”. Just remember that every great link is like a magical ray of sunshine that reaches out and lifts up the curtain your website has been hiding behind.