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 people have been careful about committing too much time into any given internet technology. Free hotmail and online faxing have been the only businesses to really stick around since the early 2000′s.

Web 2.0 has switched the focus away from big companies and granted it back directly to the individual user. Web 2.0 gifts the person with a computer and an opinion a voice on the World Wide Web.

Are you clear about Web 2.0 and what it is?

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 means is we now have the ability 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 seen. Investors can make a few clicks and all of the content from one author is printed on your site each day without any additional time invested. Copy and paste a few lines of code and you now have YouTube videos represented on your web site rather than on YouTube.com.

There are so many internet strategies covered by Web 2.0 but the principal concepts are writing blogs and setting up profiles on the various social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. A few other forms of Web 2.0 marketing include link sharing with sites like Digg and Reddit and even photo sharing sites like Flikr, Photobucket and iPhoto fall under the Web 2.0 umbrella.

How can one use Web 2.0 strategies when doing real estate investing? One obvious way is the total amount of people you will be able to contact. If you have knowledgeable things to say, you will be stunned how numerous people will pick up your blog and post it directly on their website.

Establishing yourself as an expert in your market will bring tons of opportunities your way. At the end of the day, more exposure means more money. The nice think about web 2.0 is it levels the playing field once again. If you are working the internet side of things harder than your competition, you stand a pretty good chance at moving ahead of them.

One of the best aspects about online networking and Web 2.0 is that it really does not take a lot of money. This has brought to the surface experts that before we may have never found as they bang away at their keyboards in the late of night. Free however, does not mean “no time”. You will have to spend a few minutes every day or at least a few hours per week getting the word out there.

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.

The last real estate downturn has left people searching for answers and a new plan of action in their investment businesses. While the Web 2.0 strategies might not be cut and dry, Web 2.0 is definitely the direction investors are now headed.