Real Estate Investing Has a New Generation of Web 2.0 Investors.

There is a new market that investors have to learn to stay competitive in this market and that’s the internet. More specifically it is Web 2.0 and social networking.

Since the dotcom days of Web 1.0 investors have been hesitant around investing too much time into any given internet strategy. Free email and online faxes have been the only businesses to really stick around since the early two thousands.

All of these new strategies have given so much power back to the individual. One person can bring down an entire organization by posting a less than positive review about a company. Funny thing is, most people trust a Joe Shmoe review over a multi-million dollar public relations campaign. Who can blame them with the amount of fraud and deceit that is perpetrated by large corporations each year.

So what exactly is Web 2.0?

For most people, Web 2.0 is a vast unknown with many questions and few answers. Let’s see if we can clear some of this up for you. In general it is a broad concept that covers the new user content driven websites we see like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace.

What that implies is we now have the power to communicate with thousands of investors quicker than ever before. Content can be passed along throughout the Internet with an ease of publication that has never before been . You can make a few clicks and all of the content from one author is publicized on your site every day without any extra time invested. Copy and paste a couple of lines of computer code and you now have YouTube videos represented on your site instead of on YouTube.com.

Many, many strategies and sites fit the Web 2.0 description but the basic necessities are creating a personal blog and having profiles on the various social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Real-Estate-Investing.com. You can also do social bookmarking, article writing like the one you are reading now, download mobile phone applications and so much more.

Let’s bring this back around to Real Estate Investing. How do you use Web 2.0 in your real estate business? First, networking is now a breeze. You build a twitter profile and people all over the planet start following you. You join a few of the REI social networks and find other investors to chat with in your area. Finding other investors with more experience can often pull you through to the next level. You can make a video of your property and distribute it to 100′s of video sites at one time with TubeMogul. The possibilities are really endless. Just like in the marketing days of yesteryear, the creative bird usually gets the worm.

Once you have established yourself as an authority in your market, individuals will begin to contact you for available deals and potential purchases. In the end, exposure means money. Your friend down the block may be a sharper investor than you but when a stranger Googles “real estate investing Seattle, WA” does his site show up or yours?

Maybe you are thinking, “Great, something more to spend money on.” Hang on, that’s the best part of Web 2.0, the majority of it is free. It will take you a few hours every week to make your posts and whatnot but there is very little to no out of pocket expense. A small price to pay for an equal voice in the real estate investing world.

Spend a few months creating content for your websites and I’m sure you will become more efficient and find it to be no trouble at all. Best of all, once you create the content one time it remains on the internet for years to come. Careful though, this can be a double-edged sword. Make sure you are comfortable with the entire world reading whatever you write.

Since the market crash people have been looking for distinct ways to approach the marketplace. Even though the strategies may not be wholly cut and dry, Web 2.0 and on-line social networking are the clear winners for the new direction during this changing market.