In last week’s post, 8 Must Have WordPress Plug-ins for your Real Estate Blog, I provided a list of what I considered the bare essential plug-ins for every blog to have.  There were several additional recommendations made within the comments, so I encourage you to check those out as well.  Today, I’d like to do a follow up post and highlight some awesome “nice-to-have” plug-ins that can be of great use on your blog.

As I mentioned in my previous article, while I’ve linked to the WordPress.org plug-in page for each of these plug-ins, I suggest that if you want to install them, you do so within your WordPress admin site (click on Plug-ins icon, select “Add new”, and then search based on the plug-in name).

Try to be selective with the plug-ins that you choose to use because if you get too plug-in happy, you’ll slow down the performance of your website.  Find those plug-ins that will add great value to your efforts and to your audience, and ignore all the rest.

Contact Form 7: This simple plug-in allows you to design multiple forms on your real estate blog. For example, you may want to add a simple form to collect property information from sellers, or investment/buying criteria from cash buyers.  You can set up an automatic email response to go to everyone who fills out the form.  Really great (and flexible) plug-in.

Exclude Pages from Navigation: Have you ever created a Page (not to be confused with a Post) within WordPress and then you were irritated because it showed up in the navigation menu for your blog? I have. Multiple times.  WordPress does that automatically and it is not always what you want.  The Exclude Pages from Navigation plug-in does exactly what it says….it allows you to exclude specified Pages from the menu. Awesome.

Pretty Link: Have you been using URL shorteners like Bit.ly and Tiny URL?  The Pretty Link plug-in is awesome because you can actually maintain your branding by creating URLs with your domain name.  For example, if Josh Dorkin wanted to send an email or a tweet with a link back to this article, he could simply use Biggerpockets.com/REBlogPlugins if he wanted to. This can also be used for cleaning up those ugly affiliate links you get when you’re promoting a product or service you believe it.  Pretty Link allows you not only to create these URLs, but it also provides tracking and management.

Smart YouTube: Hopefully you’re integrating video with your blog…whether its your original content or sharing relevant video content that is already available on YouTube.  If so, this plug-in will help you add YouTube videos and customize the way it looks in your blog very easily.

WP-Property: The WordPress Property and Real Estate Management plug-in is pretty powerful for rehabbers, wholesalers, and Realtors who want to list their current properties for sale.  All the fields you need are already there plus it has some customizable widgets you can use on your blog such as featured properties, property gallery, and property search capability.  It will also link up with Google Maps, so this is a really nice one to have.

Yet Another Related Post: If I were going to add a 9th plug-in to the list I posted last week, this would’ve been the one.  This plug-in does a terrific job of providing your readers with a list of related content on your blog.  This is exactly what you want because the more people hang around, the more you’ll be able to establish that important “know, like, trust” relationship.

I could continue this list, but in the spirit of simplicity, I’ll leave it at this short list.  I’m sure that some of you with real estate blogs have some other great ideas. Ones that aren’t necessarily must-haves but definitely add value.  Would love to hear your thoughts!

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

6 Killer WordPress Plug-ins for your Real Estate Blog (Part 2)

Many real estate entrepreneurs and professionals have started blogs for their businesses over the last few years which is a great way to engage clients and partners, build expertise, market services, and feature properties for sale (for wholesalers and realtors).  One of the most popular platforms for blogs is WordPress and its very powerful thanks to extensions called plug-ins.

There are some great related posts on the BiggerPockets blog on the topic of using blogs efficiently:

8 Tips on Running Your Blog Quickly and Efficiently
7 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Blog Without Search Engine Listings – Part 1
7 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Real Estate Blog Without Search Engine Listings – Part 2

Today’s post focuses specifically on plug-ins that will help you with your blog in a number of ways.  Here’s a list of my top 8 free must-have WordPress plugins for your real estate blog. There are several other plug-ins which I’d deem as nice to have because they have super cool features, but these are the ones I don’t think any blog should be without.

I’ve linked to the WordPress.org plug-in page for each of these plug-ins, however I’d suggest that if you want to install them, you do so within your WordPress admin site (click on Plug-ins icon, select “Add new”, and then search based on the plug-in name).

2 Plug-ins That Will Save You From Some Serious Grief

Akismet: The best anti-spam plug-in for WordPress.  You’d be surprised (well maybe not) at how many spam comments would show up on your blog if you didn’t have something like this to block them.

WordPress Database Backup (WP-DB-BackUp):  Need I say more? Once set up, this will handle automatic backups for your blog…the recovery of files is easy in the unfortunate event that you screw something up or your blog is hacked and you lose your posts.

3 Plug-ins That Make Social Media Sharing and Engaging Easy

TweetMeme: Provides a “Retweet” button that allows for quick and easy sharing on Twitter.

Facebook Like Button: Provides a button that allows for quick and easy sharing on Facebook.

Note: There are tons of great plug-ins for social media sharing. I focused on these two because I tend to keep things simple and Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media sites that your readers would share with.  If you want something that will allow sharing with just about every social media and bookmarking site under the sun, check out Sexy Bookmarks.

A Comments Plug-in – like Subscribe To Comments or DISQUS: I didn’t want to recommend one specific one here simply because I’ve used a few and have liked them all for a variety of different reasons.  That being said, having a solid comments plug-in is a MUST to engage with those who are reading and want to participate in discussion on your blog articles. Check these both out and see which you like better. Check out CommentLuv as an addition to your comments plug-in as well.

3 Plug-ins that Help With Search Engines and Analysis of Your Blog

Platinum SEO Pack: To put it simply, this plug-in optimizes your WordPress blog for the search engines.  This is one of those plug-ins that non-techie and non-internet marketer folks may not fully appreciate, but use it anyway and even review tutorials to understand why and how to use it.  Once you know, you know!

Google Analytics for WordPress: If you’re not already using Google’s free Analytics tool, you’re missing out on some really solid information about your blog. How much traffic are you getting, where is it coming from, which keywords are leading people to you, etc.  This plug-in helps integrate your blog with Google Analytics.

WordPress.com Stats:  Yes, I know I just recommended that everyone have Google Analytics.  However, some people just want a quick and easy view of their top posts and traffic sources, and this plug-in provides a really nice dashboard right in your WordPress admin site.  I’ve found this plug-in to be very useful when I just want a quick overview or when I want to see the keywords that lead people to the site (because the list will likely be different from the one you see in Google Analytics).

Hope you find this to be useful!  Feel free to add any other “must-have” plug-ins that you recommend to others.  Today I wanted to focus on the bare essentials, but I think a follow up post on top “nice-to-have” plug-ins will be a great and useful one as well!

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

8 Must Have WordPress Plugins for your Real Estate Blog

I’ve used Craigslist off and on for the past year to find buyers for properties,  build a cash buyer’s list in my local area, and find motivated sellers to make offers to.  The reason why I say “off and on” is because I could never find my groove and work Craigslist consistently.  Mostly because I thought it was a drag to scour through all of the ads.  In the past I’ve seen some tools that are supposed to make it easy to find the types of Craigslist ads you’re looking for and send follow up emails with a click of a button.  I’ve never used any of those, but I recently learned of a free tool that has made working with Craigslist much more bearable.  Whether you outsource this work (I do!) or do it yourself, SearchTempest is definitely worth a look.

SearchTempest makes your searches easy…you can:

• search multiple cities at once
• search by distance from a specific city or zip code
• save your favorite searches

I suspect there’s more to the tool that I am yet to discover, but those perks right there are enough for me.

A little over a week ago, fellow BiggerPockets blogger Jason Hanson suggested a Craigslist marketing strategy that involved contacting absentee owners/landlords about doing lease options. He even put out a 30 day challenge encouraging people to give it a shot which was a great idea!  Maybe lease options aren’t your thing, but SearchTempest can you help you with a number of other real estate investing strategies such as virtual wholesaling because you can find motivated sellers in numerous target markets with a simple click of the mouse.

One of the things you’ll want to do when using SearchTempest is take advantage of negative keywords (in fact, you can use negative keywords on Craigslist as well so this isn’t unique to SearchTempest).  For example, let’s say you’re looking for deals in the Arlington area of Jacksonville, Florida but you don’t like to deal with condominiums or townhouses.

What you’re going to do is type in “Arlington -condo – townhouse – townhome” in the “What” field and of course complete the other criteria such as minimum and maximum price and bedrooms.  The negative keywords are super helpful because you’ll remove a ton of ads that you don’t want to waste your time looking through.

I hope this small tip is helpful to you for your Craigslist marketing efforts! If you make it a regular habit to do your favorite searches via a tool like SearchTempest you should definitely get some solid leads and deals!

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Simplify Your Craigslist Searches & Marketing With SearchTempest

For those of you who frequent Craigslist, I’m sure as your eyes have scoured the listings they were attracted to the ads that were in CAPS and the ads that had the graphic symbols included in them.  If you’re not sure what I’m talking about take a look at the page below.

I don’t know about you, but symbols such as these are a huge attention-getter.  CraigsList is definitely not the place where you want to blend in, so symbols can come in handy.  That is until everyone starts using them.

The technical term is “ASCII Symbol”, if you use some of the corresponding ASCII codes below in your CraigsList ad titles, you too can have your ads stand out from the masses.

▲    ▲
▶▶    &#9654 ▶
▖     ▖
▆    ▆
♠      ♠
♥      ♥
♦♦    ♦ ♦
♬     ♬

So for instance, the CraigsList title,
“▶ ▶ Awesome 3 bedroom ▶ ▶ 30K Equity ▶ ▶”

will convert to

“▶▶Awesome 3 bedroom ▶▶ 30K Equity ▶▶”

I hope that helps!

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

How to Put Symbols in Craigslist Titles

In this tech post, I’d like to share a piece of software that I’ve been using for a few years now.  I used it for years in the corporate world while working in a customer support center and now I use it all the time when responding to CraigsList Ads and composing emails.

The software is called ShortKeys.

What does this software do?  Well the following definition comes straight from the makers of ShortKeys:

It’s a Windows Text Replacement utility.  Type a few characters and ShortKeys will replace them with up to 3000 keystrokes.  Great for repetitive text needs.

So basically, if there’s a block of text that you find yourself repeatedly using in Blog posts, CraigsList Ads, Facebook comments, email replies, you name it…ShortKeys can save you the effort of manually typing your redundant text.

How to use it in your real estate business:

When scouring CraigsList, since I don’t have a CraigsList auto-poster software (extremely pricey for me at the moment), I manually reply to ads to inquire about properties that pique my interest.  I have a specific ShortKey for ads listed by brokers and I also have a specific ShortKey for ads listed by owners.  So instead of typing the same text over and over again, or even copy/pasting different text using the clip board.

All I do is type…

//broker

and the following text appears

I was taking a look at your CraigsList posting for the property at [address] and I’m interested in offering on it.  I’m an investor and am looking to buy 3 houses/month for the remainder of this year in St. Louis.  Please give me some more information about the property and the situation of it’s owner…etc

For an Owner listing, I type

//owner

and the following text appears

I invest in real estate in St. Louis.  And because I’m an investor I can purchase properties as-is with cash, no contingencies, and can close very quickly.  Frankly, for me to offer such fast action, it is only feasible for me to purchase property at a fraction of what it can be sold with a Realtor for…etc

With ShortKeys, you can setup your own prefix key sequence, it doesn’t have to be “//”, it could be “#@” or whatever you want.  The reason for the prefix, is so that every time you happen to type the word broker…your specified block of text doesn’t appear.  You can try out the lite version for free and you’re allotted 15 ShortKeys indefinitely or you can purchase the full version and have an unlimited amount.

Using ShortKeys, you will save yourself a lot of time and keystrokes throughout your workday.

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Work Smart without Getting Carpal Tunnel: ShortKeys

As a real estate wholesaler, one of the websites I’ve grown increasingly fond of over the last year or so is Google Maps- particularly the “Street View” function they provide.  In fact, unless I am already intimately familiar with the neighborhood where a potential deal is located, Google Maps is the first place I go to when I start my due diligence, and it has proven to be a real time-saver!

Aside from the fact that you can get a close up view of the property itself, when using Street View, you can also get a pretty good feel for the neighborhood where the property is located.  While nothing can take the place of actually going to check out the neighborhood yourself, Street View is definitely the next best thing!

There have been numerous occasions where, after checking out a property via Google Maps, I have decided against even going out to look at it.  If you value your time as much as I do, saving an extra 30 minutes (or more) in the car just by doing a quick search online is priceless!

Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a screenshot taken from Google Map’s Street View of a potential deal that I was presented with a few weeks ago:

At first glance, the house doesn’t look too bad- good curb appeal, and a white picket fence. Nice.

Then I looked at what was across the street and this is what I found:

Golden Arches!

And then right next door there was a payment center for electric bills, cell phone bills, etc:

Being that this deal was already on the skinny side, I decided to not even bother going out to look at the interior of the property. The house was about 15 minutes away from mine, so thanks to Google Maps I saved a half hour of my time to devote to other more profitable activities.

If you aren’t already using Google Maps in your real estate business, I recommend you give it a shot- it’s a resource that’s definitely worth it’s weight in gold, and you sure can’t beat the price!

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Using Google Maps to Save Time

As technology advances, so do the ways in which we can be more efficient in doing our day-to-day operations and in mapping out our long-term goals and strategies.  This week I thought I would share some of the tools that have streamlined my operations and helped increase my business.

• Highrise from 37signals.  I recently started using Highrise and I can’t say enough about how much this has impacted my daily activities.  This tool takes contact/lead management to the next level by integrating information in as many ways as you can think of.  I am sure there are many similar programs out there, but by being so user-friendly and intuitive, I doubt I will try anything else in the foreseeable future.  This has become my virtual personal assistant.
• Docusign.   Although it may seem that everybody is already using it, I keep running into people who aren’t.  This is an amazing time saver, allowing users to sign, send, and manage documents.  No more running to the fax machine or scanning countless pages to email.  I can say without a doubt say that Docusign has helped keep a deal alive that otherwise would have perished.
• Smart phones.  Although there are many choices here and it would take a book to go through all the pros and cons of each one, I needed to mention this.  I still see real estate professionals with flip phones!  Being able to conduct business on the go is a must, clients need real-time information and responses, which a smart phone (with countless applications available) can provide.  Personally, I use a BlackBerry and I am about to jump on the iPhone bandwagon due to the limited applications available.
• Flowtown.  This has helped me convert leads into clients.  By taking information and turning that into a social profile, it allows you to better market at the individual level.  Being better able to target the specific wants/needs of your leads can make the difference in standing out from the competition.  This tool helps to redefine smart marketing.

There is a myriad of technology tools available today, with more coming on the market every day; technology will never replace the personal touch of a handshake or the certitude of a phone call, but it sure can help each of us (agents, investors, mortgage officers, etc) be more efficient/effective in how we conduct our business.

Feel free to comment and post tech tools that you find useful.

Photo: Gonzalo Baeza Hernández

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

4 Essential Tech Tools For Real Estate Professionals.

Quite a few of my geeky friends were on Foursquare way before I was.

Heck, one of them even became the mayor of my house (at 4:00am) before I started paying attention to it.

And now I am convinced that location based marketing services like Foursquare will be as mainstream in 2 years as Twitter is now.

And here is just one way that you can use Foursquare to your advantage when selling homes.

If you are a home builder and you have a community with model homes – get your community set up as a verified business on Foursquare and offer a special. Make the special compelling and watch what happens! Whenever someone checks in anywhere around your community, they will see your special.

Did you notice the “anywhere around your community” part?

In my experience, many new home communities come in clusters. Builders seem to travel in packs and build out areas all at once. What better way to market to someone than when they just checked in at your competition across the street.

If you are a Realtor who is sitting at an open house, do you have a Foursquare special set up?  Think of it as just one more way to market to the people who are in the immediate area and just may be looking at open houses on your block.

Is Foursquare big enough yet that you need to stop what you are doing right now and go figure it out?

It is unless you want someone to become the mayor of your house without you knowing.

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Have A Property To Sell? Use A Foursquare Special

This week’s exciting because we’ll now be able to fire up our site as a destination on the world wide internets.

Once you’ve got your nameservers all pointed to your hosting account, it’s time to login to your Hosting Control Panel, in this case “CPANEL,” and take the next steps.

ADD YOUR DOMAIN TO YOUR HOSTING ACCOUNT

Scroll down your CPanel and find the “Add On Domains” button.

Next, configure the addon.

Then go back and find “Fantastico” in your Cpanel. Click the happy face and you’re only a few steps away from having a fresh WordPress install working on your domain.

Now, click on “WordPress” and “Install”

Then fill in the blanks like so…

Then click finish!

And now, if you visit your site, it should look something like this:

What’s Next?

Next week, we’ll fire up our WordPress theme (skin) and start to make it look pretty…

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Add-On Domain, Intalling WordPress W/Fantastico (YorkPaQuickSale #4)

There is a service offered in a select number of counties called, Property Fraud Alert, which, after you sign-up, runs a query against any new documents recorded within the county of your choice.  The primary purpose for this service is to help stop mortgage and property fraud.  If any document recorded within your county lists your name as either the grantor (person granting title to real estate, or “seller”) or the grantee (person being granted title to real estate, or “buyer”), you are immediately sent an email alert containing the following information:

• County Location
• Document Number
• Document Type
• Recorded Date
• Party Name (the matched personal or business name)

This notification service will aid you in taking prompt action if, for instance, someone fraudulently records a document at the county, listing you as the seller of your home, which you aren’t selling! I personally signed-up for this service about a year ago after I had stumbled upon the website.  I had forgotten all about my (free) subscription to this service until one day I received an email that stated the following:

ALERT:

Dear subscriber, a document has recently been recorded that matches the monitor criteria you have provided McClelland, Justin.

The document information is:

Location: Champaign, IL

Document Number: 2009R35226

Document Type: OTHER DEEDS

Recorded Date: 12/15/2009 12:00:00 AM

Matched Party Name: GRANTEE JUSTIN MCCLELLAND

Please visit www.propertyfraudalert.com/nextsteps or call 1-800-728-3858 for information.

If you feel you have received this message in error or you wish to modify your monitor criteria, please contact Property Fraud Alert Customer Service at 1-800-728-3858

This alert came within hours of me recording a contract on a house at the county recorder’s office.  So “watch your back” and sign-up with Property Fraud Alert.  It’s free of charge in most counties.

Image by Txspiked

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Property Fraud Alert Service – Watch Your Back!

Real Estate websites, or any website for that matter, can be very intimidating to someone who knows nothing about designing websites. It’s like another world with its own language. I mean that in the most literal way possible. When you hear web designers talking all that HTML, XML, Javascript, DIV mumbo jumbo, you might get overwhelmed and dimiss the neccessity of building your own real estate website.

If you’re not a web designer, then building a real estate website can be next to impossible. However, even if you didn’t know much about web design, there is still a special “Cheat Cheat” tool you can use to accomplish your website building goals.

I’ll be honest, when I first got started online, I didn’t know anything about building a website. After using this “Cheat Cheat” tool, I’ve been able to get sites up and even learn a thing or two about web design along the way. So let’s talk about this special tool.

Introducing The WYSIWYG Editor…

Now I know what you’re thinking… Here he goes with that web designer mumbo jumbo, right? Well, it’s actually an acronymn. It stands for What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG). A WYSIWYG Editor allows anyone to generate HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language aka… the computer language used to create pages and content online) without even having to know what HTML actually is.

I’m going to break this down for you using a very simple example:

Picture yourself in a country that speaks a langauge other than English. Let’s say, a place like Paris, France. As we all know, the native language is French. Now as you’re driving around in Paris (never drive in Paris by the way!) you suddenly realize that you’re lost, so you stop and ask for directions. You see someone passing by and you say, “Excuse me sir, I’m trying to find the Eiffel Tower. Can you help me out?”

Then he replies, “Ummmm…. Essayez-vous de trouver la Tour Eiffel? Juste continuer tout droit sur cette route et tournez à gauche au feu de troisième arrêt. Vous ne pouvez pas le manquer!” (HTML)

Now, you have absolutely no clue what he just said, but you see another person who seems to be a tourist. You ask them about the Eiffel Tower, but they don’t know. However, they actually know how to speak english and french. They say that they’ll be happy to translate for you. (WYSIWYG) So they translate for you and give you your answer in a langauge you can understand. “He says If you are trying to go to the Eiffel Tower, then just keep straight on this road and make a left at the third light, you can’t miss it! Off you go to enjoy your day!

As you can see from this example, a WYSIWYG editor is like a translator. You type in the language you know and on the back end, it will actually genterate the HTML code (the langage the Web knows) that you need in order to put up your website. Whatever you see in front of you is how it will likely look as a website. You can also use this for classified advertising sites that allow html. (Like craigslist and backpage.com)

Let me show you a picture of this in action.

As you can see below, in Figure 1 we have an ad displaying a home for sale. This is exactly how you want the ad to look.

Figure 1:

In Figure 2, you see the html code. This is that same exact ad, just written in HTML.

 Figure  2:

Your WYSIWYG editor will generate the html code for you. Therefore, all you have to do is type it exaclty how you want to see it and the editor will generate the HTML accordingly.

You’ll always have the option to switch back and forth between the html view and the normal view. Figure 3 shows some samples of what the toggle button or tabs will look like.

Figure  3:

All you do at this point is copy the code and paste it into the HTML section of the advertising site. Once published, the code will be read and displayed how you see it in Figure 1.

If you’re making a website, then you can use a FREE program called NVU that has a built in WYSIWYG editor. Go to www.NVU.com and you can download their free web design software. It’s kind of like Frontpage.

All you do is create your site,  save your file, and hang it on your server (We’ll probably cover that another time..) However, that’s it! If you can type, copy, and paste, you can make a website or a really cool HTML ad on craigslist.

Here’s the link to the WYSIWYG editor I use for sites like craigslist: http://www.eclipsewebsolutions.com.au/Products/OnlineHTMLEditor/tabid/84/Default.aspx

Important Note: Depending on the features you want for your website or ad, the editor may not be able to handle it. It can get a little tricky. Therefore it may be best to reach out to a web designer for assistance. Also, this takes time. Keep it simple and it will be fairly efficient.

I’ve been using the WYSIWYG editor for years now along with utilizing web designers/graphic designers when time was short or if I didn’t feel like trying to figure it all out myself.

In the end, it’s all about getting the site up, getting leads flowing to it, and getting deals closed!

To your Sucess,

J. Lamar Ferren
New Breed Investor

Ps. Hopefully I explained this well enough. If you have any questions about this, I’ll do my best to answer them, so just leave your questions in the comment secton.

Photo: MSClipart

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

You don’t have to be a Geeky Web Designer to build a real estate website!

Since you’re reading the BiggerPockets blog right now, I presume two things about you; you’re a real estate investor/agent/professional (or aspiring to be) and you use email on a frequent basis.  If only one or neither of those traits apply to you, then read on as you may benefit as well.

Today I’m going to touch on organization in your business.  I stay organized in my daily business activities via Microsoft Outlook 2007.  I don’t think I’d be able to function without it.

Microsoft Outlook is primarily an email application that is chock full of various features that will allow you to not only manage your emails, but your business calendar, business contacts, tasks, notes, and etcetera.  And with the advent of the Smart-Phone, most of what is managed via Outlook can also be synced to your cell phone, allowing you to stay organized on-the-go.  You don’t need one of those sexy iPhones.  I have a good ‘ole Treo and it does the trick.

How can Microsoft Outlook 2007 help me better organize my emails?

One of the new features of Microsoft Outlook 2007, that wasn’t available in version 2003 or earlier, is the category feature.  You can categorize all of your incoming, outgoing, and deleted mail.  I primarily, focus on categorizing my incoming mail.  As you’ll see in the image below, I have titled multiple categories that apply to my real estate investing business.  Specifically, the email pictured is categorized as a “Business Voicemail” as it was a voicemail left on one of my many Google Voice phone numbers.

So let’s say that I wanted to view all of my emails categorized as “Business Voicemails” at once.  If I wasn’t using Outlook, I would have to search by keywords, or maybe just manually go through all of my emails.  But since I’m using Outlook, I can go from this view which contains multiple categories (notice the category-colors):

To this view that consists of solely Business Voicemails:

To this view that consist of solely Realtor emails, all within a few simple clicks:

The categories that you designate not only can apply to emails, but to your Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and Journal entries.

By organizing and categorizing many aspects of your business via Microsoft Outlook, you will be better able to efficiently run your business.

This Article is Copyright © 2004-2011 BiggerPockets, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Organize your Business with Microsoft Outlook 2007