Oh, if I had a nickel for every time I heard “you’re too old for MySpace”. If I did, I wouldn’t have to try and grow my business at all, I would be retired. Problem is, people are quick to judge and I am short on nickels. In today’s online world, you either promote yourself and your business online in some capacity – or you fade away. Period.

Social media is not a fad. It is here to stay and it brings a profound change to your potential client’s experiences. Now, not tomorrow, is the right time to implement features that will make you and your business social media friendly and will allow you to implement networking and marketing techniques that will realize increases in traffic to your website, and your bottom line.

Step 1. In the immortal worlds of Pete Townsend – Who Are You?

Ever realized you needed a document that was on a different computer
from the one you were on? With FolderShare, you can access your files
from anywhere.

• Keep all your files in sync
• Use
  FolderShare to create a mirrored image of your most important folders -
  like your Favorites, Pictures, and Documents – so they’re the same on
  all your computers.

• Sharing files is easier than ever
• Sharing
  with friends, co-workers, and family is easy when you add and update
  files in a shared library. Large files? Not a problem – FolderShare can
  sync files up to 2 GBs in size. And it works on both Mac and PC.

• Get to your files instantly when you’re away from home
• Install FolderShare on all your computers, and you can access all your files from any computer on the Internet.

Microsoft Foldershare is what we finally settled on after months of trial and error. Hopefully, in us sharing this with you and your business, you can get to syncing with a bit less effort then us. Best of all, unlike many of the other apps we tried, this one is completely free. The only draw back we can find is that there is a 10,00 file limit on a single sync point, but you can get around that by syncing the underlying folders separately. If you need help, as always, feel free to contact us @ 1.866.516.1576 for all your online consulting needs.

A brand spanking new release came out April 22nd and you can Install Foldershare for Windows by following this link.

Please let us know what you think…

In previous articles I combed over Google Gadgets for your iGoogle homepage. Now, I move into looking into Google Gadgets for your website. How can you male it that a user of your site doesn’t need to leave? Simply give them all of what they need online in one place – your place. The following are a few of the google gadgets we have been experimenting with. Leave us a comment if you use one on your website and have received positive feedback on it. Most of these gadgets lend themselves well to blogs, but can work on a website if incorporated ina tasteful and thoughtful way. Not like we have here…

Contact Us if you would like help setting these or any other gadget on your blog or website.

General Modules

Real Estate Specific Modules

Its that time of year again, and I am not talking about Groundhog Day, even thought it is an undervalued national holiday (and a equally undervalued and spectacular Bill Murray movie.)

Nope, its tax season. And if you are like me, and run a small business, that’s great for your accountant, and not so great for you, your free time, or you wallet. I wanted to pass on a small tool that made my life just a touch more manageable this year. I work a lot with contractors and consultants, which means a bevy of 1099 activity. There are several avenues you can travel down for your employee W2’s or 1099’s. You can let your accountant take care of it, you can do it yourself, or you can let the magic of the world wide web help you along. Since I am a believer in magic (an an online solutions company), I opted to explore my options on the web.

Most services out there will do your 1099’s, but for a price, and most only make sense if you are doing bulk submissions (20-30+). However, I found a little site, with a very apt name: FileTaxes.com

I searched and searched, and stumbled across this one. One can file single 1099’s or multiple 1099’s for a flat rate of $3.49, a great price for the small business that don’t need a ton of them filed. It also efiles with the IRS, mails them to the recipient, provides you with hard-copies, and emails a conformation upon delivery. You can read more at http://www.filetaxes.com

Read more at inspiring design, llc.

This is an article in a monthly series – how to run a business using online tools.

I try not to blog too much about what has already been talked about, but could only find one article on gizmoz.com, and since I have been playing with it extensively this morning, thought I would share a bit, and hopefully solicit some feedback.

So to start, what is gizmoz? In short – it is a service that will allow you to generate a talking avatar. You can upload a picture of your face and it will build a 3-D image. It also allows you to put voice to your digital communications. Personal service to the comical extreme. For most of us, once you complete the easy process of building your first (what they call) character-based visual expression, it may come out looking like a dysfunctional mini-clone; eerily reminiscent of the 80’s pop culture icon Max Headroom. So can their be a legitimate business application to this?

I have decided to experiment.

I have produced a short 20 second video clip (see the sidebar to the right) that can be played upon entering my website. From this point on, for the next month or so, I will monitor my analytics account to see if I can keeping more people on my site for longer. Take a look:

Now – I didn’t use myself, since I was trying to give this a hint of professionalism and no matter how many different pictures I used, I couldn’t get it to a point that didn’t make me want to reconsider this experiment. Maybe I am just digitally self conscious, but I’d rather use one of the provided (and admittedly better looking) provided pictures.

Does does this work? We shall see. I will have statistics next month, but in the mean time, take a look, let me know what you think, and if you could ever see using this as an application in your business.

Justin

inspiring design, llc.

202-552-1825

The following is a list of 40+ online web 2.0 websites, applications, and communities, some that are in beta (or even alpha) development stages. If you know if one we missed, by all means tell us, this should be an organic, ever growing list.

Home Values

Zillow

It allows anyone to find rough estimates of the valuation of their home by searching comparable properties. While values are not always accurate, the site continues to get it better.

RealEstate ABC

Beta property valuation tool competing directly with Zillow. It uses Google Maps in its technology mashup and allows you to do cool things like adjust values of properties given certain market conditions.

Spokeo

When I stumbled upon this site and looked at the tool for a minute or two, I thought, “hey this could be interesting”. After I entered my email and fed it my contact list of 450 people, I went from interested, to amazed, to nervous, all in about 3 minutes. I think for what the tool was designed to do, it works well, and was nice to see people I never even thought to track down in mySpace or Facebook. It also felt a bit like I was intruding, since most of these people post to site not ever thinking that a tool like this would come along.

So whats the tool, and what does it do? You feed it a list of email addresses and it goes and searches 22 sites (everything from flickr, picasa, myspace, to your wish list at amazon.com) and brings you a list of your “friends” (or anyone you have an email address for) and their pictures, blog posts, twitter thoughts, and products they hope to soon buy.

The first thing I thought, is oh boy, I hope that at some point I didn’t add anything embarrassing to my wish-list on amazon. It was a brutal reminder that everything you post on-line sticks around for a very long time and can and will be found, even if you don’t intend it to. Don’t get me wrong, this is a amazing little tool they have going one here. It will consolidate my social networking for my business in ways I couldn’t have imagined just yesterday. You can enter yourself and track all of the places you network in one central hub.

I guess this is the way we are trending with the web. Web 1.0 connected information, web 2.0 connects people. Give it a shot and let me know your feeling on this tool and implication on privacy and your social networking plan.

http://www.spokeo.com

Why you should use them to get local info, list your business with, and even own your own…

It started out as the World Wide Web. It was amazing the reach one could have, chatting to someone in Ireland, buying something from South Africa, emailing someone in New Zealand, all from your living room. Everything was about big, wide, and breaking down the invisible boarders of distance that have so long separated neighbors of the world.

Now, we are starting to see a trending back toward local and the community. Google, Yahoo, and AOL all have local portals and searches. Also, independent local portals are becoming big business in the web world. Why, because everyone wins. The people or companies that develop the site do so for branding, marketing, advertising, etc and the users get information on their local community quickly and easily, a service that even the biggest companies have a hard time providing. Why, because it is users of the local community portal that drive the content, and not even Google can keep up with real time information on every local community. It can be expensive to list with nationally based portals, so local small businesses can advertise for much less on a local, community based portal, sometime even for free.

At sites like UrbanaMD.info, a local Urbana Maryland community portal, all businesses can obtain their own webpage for free. This seem counterintuitive if the owner of the site hopes to make some cash, right?, Well, if you look at it, once again everyone wins. The more information listed on the site, the more end users, and the more revenue from advertising. Most of the time the owner of a site is a development company hoping to gain market share through branding – or a local real estate agent or mortgage broker hoping to gain community trust, appreciation, and recognition through providing a community service based application.

If it isn’t obvious by now, my company runs several of these sites, just recently releasing UrbanaMD.info. AT UrbanaMD Joining is FREE, Classified Ads are FREE and UNLIMITED, and basic Business Listings are FREE. Once you join, you will be able to post to the forums, add your business, check out our recipe Xchange, and even create your own “My Urbana Space” page much like MySpace.com. These are only a few of the things going on around here, and new things are being added daily. There are now over 160 local businesses and restaurants now listed under the “Our Urbana” Section

A site like this provides a public service and in using open source software such as Joomla, can be sold as a reasonable priced, pre-packaged application to anyone that is interested (contact us if you are). But this isn’t just a pitch; you should list your business with every local portal possible, getting your name out there as much as possible. But owning and operating a local portal can take your business to the next level.

Some more articles to mull over:

Get Thee To Thy Local Portal

Promote Your Business through Local Web Portals

Local Portals Mean Big Business

Geolocal – Local Internet Marketing for Small Business

.inspiring.estates. is a content management system (CMS) geared specifically to Real Estate agents, that allows you to manage properties on your website in an easy and effective way. This powerful combination enables you to run a real estate website and use the most user friendly open source Web Content Management System (CMS) available today – Joomla CMS!
Our products are developed based on several case studies and feedbacks from our users. Now you can list and manage your real estate properties easily using .inspiring.estates.

• Easily Manage Properties and Site Content
• Publish and Showcase Properties at the Click of a Button
• Attach an Unlimited Number of Photos per Property
• Advanced On-Site Search Engine
• Search Engine Optimized
• Recommend Property to Friend Feature
• Company and Agent Information
• Allows Individual Agent Login and Listings
• Featured Property Module
• Print Property Details
• Save Property Info as PDF

These are several reasons you can be assured that choosing our .inspiring.estates. is the right investment for your company. Many realtors interested in .inspiring.estates. also love our .inspiring.mail. program, an email managment system.

BNI is a referral based networking group for professionals, plain and simple. Most people have heard of it and some have considered joining. I weighed the option for a year before taking the plunge and wanted to share my experience. Some background…

BNI allows one and only one person per professional group into a chapter at once. SO, there can be only one real estate agent, one web designer, one marketing exec, etc. This allows you to lock out the competition and have sole access to your fellow members (or sales staff if you want to look at it that way) and their network of contacts.

Why it worked for me…

The positive aspects of the group are many. The thing that BNI has helped me and my company does is shape, mold, and hone our image. You have a wide variety of members with diverse background and experience. It is necessary to be able to effectively communicate your business ideas and goals to them and to communicate what make a great referral for you. In my line of work, I tend to speak in straight up DORK. Now, I have brought it down to a slight dweeb accent.

You learn how to forge effective partnerships with others, learning how to listen as well as speak (as previously mentioned). The motto is givers gain, and it is not just a sappy one liner. The more you work to develop the personal and professional relationships within the group, the more you get from the group and the experience as a whole. Each person not only can impart wisdom from years of experience, but your clients and other non-BNI associates will benefit from your acquisition of knowledge as well as your ability to refer experience professional from a diverse array of professions and backgrounds.

Nothing like telling a client, “I got someone for that…”

You will most likely find your “other” in the group. It is that one profession that you just have to have (mortgage broker and real estate agent, web design and computer fixer guy, etc) – they just fit together. This is the low hanging fruit and this keeps the pocketbook happy while you spend the time and effort to train the rest of your BNI associates as your own sales staff.

BNI is a commitment. This isn’t an optional thing, and you can show up late. It is a weekly appointment, just like any other meeting. Some find it hard to make an hour a week commitment to the program. Others find it hard to make the commitment of the 1000 plus dollars it will cost over the course of the year for dues and meeting fees. And to you, you may be right, BNI may not be for you, but it was, and still is for me.

This isn’t a cure all, and should only be used as a small part of your overall business plan, I have seen some sink all their eggs into the BNI basket and wonder why they don’t do the business they want. I have more than paid for my dues and fees a half a dozen time over, and I am still the new guy. I can’t wait to see what happens as I grow and help build the group.

If you are in the DC area and want to stop by a chapter to see if BNI is right for you or you just want to knwo a bit more about BNI, take a look at our website at http://www.bni-gaithersburg.com