In this series on using Evernote for your real estate business, probably one of the top three uses is for research on the Internet.  The ways in which you can use it to save pages, images, or text from websites you visit are great, but there are other ways to gather intelligence and get it into Evernote for retrieval later.  In various ways, we use:

• What your competitors are doing.
• Local news about real estate, zoning, and real estate taxes.

• National and local news influencing home prices.
• Information topics for your website content.
• Researching products and services for your business management & marketing.

We're independent contractors always open to new products and services that will help us to manage and market our businesses.  For our purposes, better CRM solutions, easier record-keeping for taxes, secure storage of client information, website solutions, email marketing solutions, and other business tools are of interest.  Sometimes we're searching for information, but other times we stumble across marketing pitching solutions to us.

How many email pitches do you get for online and print products for real estate professionals?  Just because they're unsolicited doesn't mean that they aren't valuable when the time is right.  Using your Evernote email address, you can send solicitation emails to your Evernote account, choose the notebook and/or tag it for easier location later.  It's passive research that can be recalled later when you're ready to get more serious about a new product or service for your business.

Subscribe to email newsletters from the city, county, or other government or organizations involved in activities that influence the real estate market.  When they come in, just send them to Evernote.  Use Rules in Outlook or Filters in Gmail to automatically send them to Evernote by recognizing specific senders and automatically forwarding the emails.

When it comes to content for your website, there is a wealth of information out there on the Internet that would be of interest to your site visitors.  If you keep up with industry news and press about your local market, saving the information you come across can help you to easily create great original content for your site.  Using tags and notebooks, you can gather articles and pull them up when you're ready to add content to your site.  You can even do a little legal curation using small snippets of articles to put together your new article with your commentary.

If you're researching at the courthouse and find documents related to subdivisions or homeowner associations, Evernote is a great place to set up notebooks for areas or subdivisions.  File away those covenants and restrictions for future reference to answer questions, or for an article about a subdivision on your website.

As real estate professionals we're out and about, driving neighborhoods and our market area, taking property tours, and working with sellers in their homes.  In our travels we are missing opportunities to take photos of things of interest to anyone who is researching a neighborhood or area.  Using our smart phone with Evernote's camera app, the photos go straight to the notebook we designate, and we can gradually build up a wealth of material for use on our website later.

Evernote acts not only as a filing system, but a sort of backup for important information as well.  Start paying attention to snippets of data you bump into every day, whether online, in email, or even in written form.  A quick Evernote camera snapshot of a document gets it filed away for reference later.  Virtually every facet of your daily business activities can benefit from Evernote.