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About Schmap – http://schmap.it/about
Schmap is a location technology service provider and local publisher, with cutting-edge expertise at the intersection of local, social, commercial and the real-time web. We’re best known for our real-time city guides, and our popular Twitter service: Real-time City Guides

We released our first Schmap City Guides in March 2006: initially revised twice a year, our guides are now updated real-time, with local buzz for restaurants and bars from Twitter users, reviews from local residents, local photos from more than 300,000 contributing photographers, plus events, activities and local deals via users of our popular Twitter service.
Schmaps & Schnaps Twitter Service

Released in October 2009, Schmaps & Schnaps is now the market leading service for promoting local business and events on Twitter. The basic service is free, with a PRO upgrade giving local businesses and event promoters access to advanced marketing features: approved partners can also offer the service to their users via our API/Plugin.
Schmap was founded in 2004: we’re based in Carrboro, North Carolina, with a development office in Beijing, China.

Are you using Schmap with your Twitter account? Are you using this to promote your real estate properties? We would love to hear from you, please take a moment to let us know your thoughts.

The post Found a great tool appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

HTML code for Social Networks

View the text file with the HTML source for the social network icons.

Simply copy and paste the code from the TEXT file into the widgets, inside of your PropTrackr account.

The post Adding Social Network Icons to Your PropTrackr Account appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

Setup is simple and easy! Take a few minutes and watch the PropTrackr Real Estate Management System training video and we will show you how easy it is to add multiple languages to your PropTrackr real estate website.

Click the download button to copy the HTML text used to display and link the multiple language icons to Google Translate, converting your site into multiple languages.

The post Adding Multiple Languages to your PropTrackr Real Estate Website appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

In the busy world of Real Estate professionals, organization is a critical aspect. Considering all of the work that needs to be done, any tools available can help.

We recommend Google Apps because it has powerful functionality that may be helpful to your business and because, since it is all web based, you can access it from anywhere you have an internet connection (just like PropTrackr).
Google Apps is free for up to 50 users, can be customized to your domain (including e-mail addresses), and comes with:

• Gmail – A web-based e-mail app that provided 25 GB of email & IM storage (that’s a lot!), has excellent spam filtering, and can be synced with Outlook & smart phones.
• Google Calendar – A web-based calendar application that supports shared project calendars, integrates with e-mail, and can be accessed from mobile devices.
• Google Sites – An easy-to-use web site builder
• Additional business applications. – Check out the Google Apps web-page for more information

Google Apps can be used with any web domain. For example, if your website is ‘example.com’, the e-mail app will be located at ‘mail.example.com’, your calendar will be located at ‘calendar.example.com’ and your e-mail address would look like ’email@example.com’

We hope that you find these tools useful, and we look forward to sharing more tips.

Thanks,

The PropTrackr Team

The post Useful Applications by Google appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

Continuing the PropTrackr Real Estate Tip of the Day, we started researching useful news stories from across the country for real estate professionals. We have spent our time reading over a few news stories wondering if this would be useful for our PropTrackr clients. Then we came to the conclusion that most our clients either now about these stories already or the stories don’t apply to them because they don’t live in that state. So we changed our research to “how to marketing yourself real estate” and came across this wonderful article written in July of 2009 by Nicole Nicolay at MyTechOpinion.com

It’s always a great reminder for all of us to find stories/articles like this, it allows us to review what we are doing to drive business, what we are doing to market our business and it’s just a great refresher for ourselves on what we need to do to keep our business running smoothly and successfully. Go check out Nicole’s write up 50 Do-It-Yourself Marketing Ideas for Your Real Estate Business. Nicole give some great advice for anyone new to the real estate industry or if your a real estate veteran.

Be sure to connect with us:
Subscribe to the PropTrackr Talk RSS Feed.
PropTrackr on Facebook
PropTrackr on Twitter
PropTrackr on Google Buzz
PropTrackr on Digg

Sign up today for
PropTrackr Real Estate Management Software
– FREE 14 Day Trial! –

The post Tip of the Day. appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

Good Morning – Hope you all had a great weekend. Here at PropTrackr.com we are always looking for ways to improve our software along with helping our clients with some marketing tips. Our development team has been working hard on improving the software [read the details here] but here in the customer service department we have been slacking a little bit on the marketing tips. So starting this morning we’re going to start adding tips to the PropTrackr Talk section of our blog.

Here is the first tip we wanted to share this link with all the PropTrackr clients, we came across this in one of our Facebook updates from one of our friends. He created a post this morning about the top 10 ways to get Facebook fan likes on your page. This is such a great post, if you are not utilizing the social networks to advertise your business, we would highly recommend you get started. This tip will help you improve your Facebook “likes”. Read the full post at Larry Brauner – Online Social Networking web site.

Thanks Larry for the Tip!

Be sure to connect with us:
Subscribe to the PropTrackr Talk RSS Feed.
PropTrackr on Facebook
PropTrackr on Twitter
PropTrackr on Google Buzz
PropTrackr on Digg

Sign up today for
PropTrackr Real Estate Management Software
– FREE 14 Day Trial! –

The post Tip of the Day. appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

We also showed you a simple example of how to create a blog posting to advertising your real estate properties, click here to read the full article. By simply taking an hour or so to write up a blog posting to promote a real estate property can improve and help your organic search engine optimization.

We will now give you an example of what tools you can you use to promote your real estate property blog postings to the social networks. The tools we suggest are free to use and you may already be using them with in your business.

Tools to use to promote your real estate business

Here is a list of the social network sites and tools (click here) you can use to automate the process of advertising your real estate properties through your PropTrackr real estate blog. The idea behind this it to make an automated process for advertising your real estate properties. To break down the process in a nutshell, write a blog post in your PropTrackr account and the automated process posts to Facebook, Twitter and Digg allowing you to advertise on those sites without logging into them every time.

Social Networks & Tools

• Facebook Fan Page (read how to setup a fan page)
• Twitter
• Digg
• Hootsuite

The first step that needs to be accomplished is to set up your PropTrackr Account and configure your blog to show up on your PropTrackr website. Simply follow these steps here on How to setup your PropTrackr Real Estate Blog. Once your blog is setup you are now ready to link all of these social sites to your new blog postings. Linking your blog to your social networking sites will post ALL of you blog postings, if you would like to link them to categories in you PropTrackr blog you will need use the RSS feed that is specific to that category, see step four below for further details.

Step two – make sure you have setup your Facebook Page, Twitter account and Digg account. Having your username and passwords handy makes the linking the accounts quicker.

Step three – sign up for a FREE account with Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a 3rd party web based application that allows you to see all of your social networks in one easy to read dashboard.
HINT: if you use Google Chrome as your web browser you can create a web based application shortcut. Its a lot like a bookmark but instead of showing the webpage in a new tab or window, Google Chrome starts the web application like a normal program.

Step four – Create your first blog post within the PropTrackr system. Once you have created your first blog post you will need to locate the XML feed or RSS feed for your blog. This is easy to locate, simply navigate to your PropTrackr real estate website in your web browser and in the address bar after your address, type or copy, /feed/rss/ and place it after your websites address. For example here is PropTrackr’s rss feed for our blog http://proptrackr.com/feed/rss/. This is a complied list of all your blog postings, in every category. If you would like to locate each RSS feed for every subcategory of your blog, simply navigate to the category and place /feed/rss/ after the entire web address. For example if we would just like to pull all the blog posts from our category “Tools for Real Estate” our RSS feed would look like this ( http://proptrackr.com/category/blog/tools-for-real-estate/feed/rss/ ).

Step five – setting up your Facebook and Twitter account in Hootsuite. This is easier if you are already logged into both your Facebook and Twitter account and have them open in a web browser. Hootsuite takes advantage of the APIs that Facebook and Twitter have developed. By having both accounts active in a web browser, Hootsuite can easily make the connection to your social networks. To add a social network to Hootsuite click on the owl in the top left corner, navigate down to Settings, then to Social Networks and click on the Add Social Network button and choose the social network, Facebook Wall, Facebook Page, Twitter Account, etc.

Step six – LINKING EVERYTHING TOGETHER. This is were Hootsuite becomes very useful, allowing you to grab your PropTrackr RSS feed and posting them to Facebook and Twitter.

1. Login to your Hootsuite Account
2. Navigate to the top left corner ( the image of the owl ) and click for your settings. Click here to see a screen shot
3. Navigate down to Settings > RSS/Atom. Screen shot
4. Once you have clicked on RSS/Atom link, a window will popup (screen shot ) click on the “Add New Feed Button” located at the bottom of the popup window.
5. Copy your RSS feed from your PropTrackr website and paste it into the FEED URL box and set up how often you would like Hootsuite to review your RSS feed, How many posts would you like Hootsuite to posts on your social networks at a time and if you would like a some Prepend text before your posting. Be sure to check which social networks you would like Hootsuite to post to and click save feed. Screen shot here.

Your all set, you have now successfully added your PropTrackr Blog RSS feed to Hootsuite. Don’t worry you can always come back to Hootsuite to set up more RSS feeds or change and update the ones you already have.

Step seven – Setting up Digg to read your blog and automatically post your new advertisements on Digg. If you haven’t already set up a free account on Digg take a few minutes to do so. Just like Hootsuite, Digg takes advantage of Facebook and Twitters API login. Once you set up your Digg account and customize the features and information that is going to be displayed its time to make the connection between your PropTrackr Real Estate Blog and Digg. Navigate to the setting tab, top right corner near the search box. ( screen shot here ). Once the page loads, on the left hand side of the screen you should see some more navigation, click on the Import Feed link. ( screen shot ).
Copy your PropTrackr Blog RSS URL, explained above how to locate that url. Your url should look something like this (http://proptrackr.com/feed/rss/ ) and paste that into the Auto-Submit Content field. Choose where you would like the feed to display, here at PropTrackr we chose the Business category.

Once you clicked the “Add Feed” button you will need to verify that Digg is collecting your RSS Feed by placing a verification key in your blog post title or the body of your posting.

To place the Digg verification key in the description, login to your PropTrackr real estate management account and navigate to Posts, then navigate to your most recent blog posting. Click on the “edit” text link and make sure you are editing the body of the post in HTML format rather then the VISUAL format. Paste the Digg verification code in the body of you blog posting and click the update/publish button on the right hand side of the page.

Click back to your Digg account and verify that Digg is reading your RSS feed correctly.

You have now successfully added your blog’s RSS feed to post to your Facebook page, Twitter account and your Digg account. You can now focus on running and advertising your real estate properties and feel comfortable knowing that your blog is being submitted to your social networks.

Did this blog posting help you and your real estate business advertise your properties? Do you have more ways to connect your social networks sits together and make advertising real estate properties easier? We would love to hear about them, take a few minutes and join in on the conversation.

The post Using Technology to Your Advantage to Promote your Real Estate Properties appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

Spending an hour or so to write up a blog post once or twice a week can help improve your website visibility by adding new and changing content. All the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com) love indexing new content and the more content you have changing the more the search engines will return to index your site.  Read more about improving your website rankings with these suggestions.
Survey Results : Impact of blogging on search engine optimization @ TopRankBlog.com
Blogging for SEO @ SEO Articles SEO for Google

PropTrackr has made this task simple for all of our clients by integrating one of the most powerful blogging platforms on the web today, WordPress. WordPress allows our clients to easily post a blog articles directly to their PropTrackr real estate website. Making it simple to pass on real estate related news, new property details and everyday postings about your business.
We will quickly go over how simple it is to setup a new post to advertise a new real estate property. If you haven’t setup your blog yet read this article at the PropTrackr support center and get started blogging today.

6 simple steps to creating a blog post in the PropTrackr Real Estate Management Software.

Step 1. Login to your PropTrackr real estate account.
Step 2. Navigate to the website design grid on the left hand side. (see the screen shot below)

Step 3. Click on the posts link and add a new post.
Step 4. Type out all property details, property price, description, add in pictures, add in video. Anything you would like to help sell or get your post noticed. Choose the category you would like you post to show up under.*
Step 5. Link your real estate property details over to your PropMapr account for further details.
Step 6. Click publish in the top left of your screen and view your new blog post at your PropTrackr website.
*Here at PropTrackr we suggest if you are going to post property details as a blog post that you create a Real Estate Property Category for all your listings to be under.

Just like that you have created a blog post on your site, advertising your real estate property and increasing the number of pages for the major search engines to index. Take a look at a quick example of a property blog post here.

Do you have any advertising suggestions, where to post properties, what to blog about? Take a minute and leave us a comment, we would love to share those ideas with our clients.

Stay tuned as we expand on this idea and show you next time how to have your blog post syndicate out to the major social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Digg. The only thing you have to do is post on your blog and the tools we suggest do the rest.

The post Blogging… Promoting Your Real Estate Properties appeared first on Real Estate Management Software from PropTrackr.

Tips & Tricks to make your life easier and more organized, Google Voice.

What is Google Voice?
Google Voice is a telecommunications service by Google launched on March 11, 2009. The service provides a US phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each user account. ( read more )

What are the advantages of using Google voice?
Multiple phones and numbers linking to just one phone number, call your Google voice number and your home phone, cell phone, office line and your car phone rings also. Ok nobody has a car phone anymore but if you had a car phone then yes it would ring. Never miss another call again because they called the office line and you weren’t there. Plus you can have one phone number to give out for the rest of your life, no more handing out a cell number, home number or office number.

How can Google voice save me time in PropTrackr?
Google Extension for Google Chrome turns any phone number on the web into a clickable link. Once you click the number Google Voice calls you on the phone you choose and automatically connects you to the number you just clicked. No more picking up the phone and dialing the 10 digit number. Now all of your contacts phone number in the PropTrackr System are easy to reach by just the click of the button.

Google voice allows you to have multiple numbers and telephone lines but stay in contact with them at all times. Saving time by no longer checking messages on multiple lines, making sure you don’t miss that important business call because you had to run out of home or office. Your family telephone can now ring to your cell phone or office line.

Why would I use Google voice?
One phone number, online voicemail, and enhanced call features.

What are the advantages?

• One Number – Use a single number that rings you anywhere.
• Online voicemail – Get transcribed messages delivered to your inbox.
• Cheap calls – Free calls & text messages to the U.S. & Canada with SUPER low rates everywhere else.
• Extension for Google Chrome – You can now use Google Voice with your existing mobile phone number. You won’t get all the functionality that a Google number brings you, but you’ll get Google Voicemail, low priced international calling, and several other useful features.
• Receive & reply to SMS messages by email – With SMS forwarding, you can receive text messages via email. Reply straight to those emails to save on text message fees.

Read more about the advantages of Google Voice Here.

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