I've written about it in the past, social networking is time consuming. Here are a few more tools to help you save time managing your social networking efforts.

StumbleUpon is a social community that allows users to vote on posted content through an installed toolbar on their desktop. This is a great place to get your content posted in front of a very engaged audience. The StumbleUpon Alerter is a great tool that easily provides a view into your StumbleUpon account’s activity.

Like StumbleUpon Reddit is a highly engaged community that allows users to vote on content right on their site. To save time managing your Reddit posts there is now the Reddit River mobile version. It is 3 times as light (in size) and automatically discovers mobile versions of stories posted on Reddit. It also supports viewing the various SubReddits.

Propeller is a social news site, not unlike Digg. The PropellerTray is a tool that allows you to see the vote and comment count on each of the content pieces you submitted to Propeller.com.

Twhirl is a great desktop tool for Twitter users. it gives you the opportunity to do just about anything that you can do on Twitter within a little window on your desktop. It also has a great Outlook integration giving you a 'new email-like' message every time you receive a Twitter message.

Facebook's rise within the college student community has enabled it to grow into a dynamic yet professional environment which is very effective for marketing your business (or yourself). Not as personal as MySpace and not as static as Linked In, Facebook offers a great middle-of-the-road solution for business professionals.

The thing to keep in mind when using Facebook for your business is that it's true value is in building new business relationships and strengthening old ones. Here are three tips for those of you who may be new to the Facebook scene.

1. Build a great profile...not a good one but a great one! Your Facebook profile will be the center point of your Facebook strategy. Provide details about your business, skills and background. Also, include some person interests. A good profile is great for search engine optimization outside of Facebook. When creating your profile, think about the reasons why someone would be interested in talking to you and write about it...keep it engaging, fun yet professional.

2. Reach out to people you know and others within the industry. Think of Facebook as a giant networking opportunity. Send messages within Facebook to others in your industry, request to be friends, start a dialog. Don't be shy...

3. Reach your target market through friends. As you make connections look at the friends of your immediate friends and start to build new relationships through them. This will quickly expand your network with the right kind of people that you are trying to reach.

If you are apprehensive to send a message to someone, post on their wall. If someone posts a message to you, make sure you respond on their wall. And remember, be social...your next sale may depend on it.

Banner ads are one of the oldest forms of online marketing. There is a chance that you are using in the links to your site on partner sites or considering using some to drive traffic to your site.

I recently came across some info from Marketing Sherpa that I found interesting regarding how to improve response rates to banner ads.

Here is the tip: In a recent test performed by Marketing Sherpa they found that the phrase ‘Start Shopping Now’ performed much better than including a free offer in the banner ad. This is contrary to what many marketers have believed in the past.

So, if you are planning to use banners to drive traffic to your Real Estate site, think about including marketing text like “New Homes throughout the Phoenix Area. Start Searching Now”.

Also, they found that the best size for your banner in terms of response is 300x250. This size beat all other banner sizes in terms of click through rates.

When people are searching for a realtor online where are they going? Compete analytics has broken down the top sites that people go to when they do a search on the term 'realtor'. We can assume that these people are in market for real estate or looking for a realtor. No surprise who the top site is, however what is a little more interesting are the sites below the top.

Some definitions for you:

Keyword Share - The percentage of total click throughs generating from the 'realtor' keyword search going to that specific site.

Site Share - The amount of total site traffic that click throughs on the term 'realtor' accounts for.

Average Monthly Search Referrals - All clicks generated to that site from any search engine in a given month.

Google Adwords continues to be the dominant channel for online advertising, however Google's foray into print seems to be ramping up a little more slowly. Google Print Ads allow advertisers to easily advertise in up to 600 newspapers nationwide, all managed (and tracked!) through Google Adwords. Advertisers have the ability to target specific publications in the local markets that they are most interested in. Like Adwords, Print Ads gives advertisers the ability to name their own price on the specific ad of choice in any publication. Newspapers then have the option of accepting or denying that bid.

I recently used Google Print Ads for a client and had good results. The tools were easy to use and we had a nice ROI on the advertising purchased. For an overview of how Google Print Ads works click here: http://services.google.com/training/adwords/printads/print_adwords/

According to Comscore, overall traffic going to real estate sites in the month of February is up, year over year. This may be good news for the market, showing an increase in overall consumer interest in the real estate market. 

Not much new here, however top apartment and rental related sites are showing an overall decrease in consumer interest, which I did find interesting.

WWW. .com

I recently read an article by Aaron Wall that was very interesting and struck a chord with me. I'm constantly getting this question: "yesterday I was ranked #1 on Google and today I'm gone without changing a thing...why?" Well there are many, many reasons why a search rank can change quickly, especially in Google, but one can be the direct result of a human review of your site by Google employees.

Google has a team of human site reviewers that analyze the content of each site that is indexed by the spider. Of course the spider moves faster than humans do but they will catch up at some point. Here is a simple question to ask yourself about your website that can gauge how your site may be viewed by Google:

'if all images, scraped content and ads were removed from my site would there still be value?'. If not you will likely be construed as spam.

As Aaron pointed out in his article Google has destroyed the Pagerank of most of the low end link selling blogs, article directories and general web directories. Working with these site will not improve your ranking, it's as simple as that.

Bottom line, make sure you are providing valuable and original content and you will likely avoid the Spam categorization.

Like most bloggers you probably could use more traffic to your blog. Getting people to Digg your content or submit your content to Reddit is critical to generating traffic. But how can you get more people to do this? Here are a few tips that might help you out.

The overarching thing to keep in mind is that most people interested in digital content are busy and sifting through a ton of content every day. They tend to skim everything they read, paying attention to only the most relevant pieces of content in an article. When pulling your content together for your next post, keep this in mind.

Readers do not want 20 pages – People active in social meda are not necessarily interested in pages upon pages of content. They understand that many bloggers will set extensive pagination in order to generate more impressions…you’re not fooling anyone. Keep it reasonably short, long enough to get the message out and for the reader to gain value from the article.

Always include a subheading – Subheadings are great tool for someone who wants to Digg your article. This gives them something to quickly use as a description.

The title is everything – Just like pulling content together for a website, blog article titles are critical. On many sites, like Reddit, it’s only the title that people initially see so you need to captivate them immediately. Make sure you are taking some extra time you’re your title.

Always include an image – Even the most basic of images will be more captivating to a skimmer than a straight text article. For sites like Digg that allow images, this will help you stand out from the blogs without. People are naturally drawn to images.