Alright, so maybe we all get a little tired of hearing about all this Web 2.0 talk, but you have to admit that it has resulted in a lot of great small to midsize start-ups that make all of our lives a little bit easier. Maybe a bit more affordable as well?

If you run an office or purchase your own office supplies, you probably know how expensive they can get. Fortunately, the Web 2.0 era has produced a number of online services that can help us save a little money while still maintaining a superior level of quality. Let me show you some examples.

Business Cards:

Business cards are a necessity for every real estate agent, mortgage broker or any other professional business man or woman. The problem, is that they can get pretty costly, especially if you are having them designed and printed, but there are some alternatives:

  • Most business cards are designed with an image editing and creation program called Photoshop. I own this particular program and can tell you with certainty that it is very expensive, much more than what a casual/light user would want to spend. There is however, a free online alternative that has most of the “necessary” alternatives and that is Pixlr. You can cut out the design costs buy creating them yourself with this free online program.
  • Now I know that some of you are thinking I am crazy, because there is just no way that you could possibly design your own business card, right? Well not really. There are a number of free business card .psd templates that can be used in conjunction with Pixlr above, for example this one, this one and this one.
  • If you aren’t finding a template that you like, you could use some of the available photoshop tutorials to make your own. For instance, this tutorial as well as this one and that one will help get you started. Don’t forget to do a google search to find some more, there are plenty great business card tutorials out there.
  • If designing your own in photoshop still isn’t the way you want to go, you can use a free card creation service like Business Card 2 or Snapily.
  • Once you have the perfect business card all made up, you might as well get it some free exposure over at The Card Board.

Schedules and Appointments:

We get it, you’re busy! That doesn’t make it ok that you just miss an appointment or loose track of your day to day schedule. You guessed it, there are some pretty neat services and tools to help with this area to, check them out:

  • If you are as bad at remembering your daily tasks as I am, you’re in trouble. Thankfully, there are a lot of online services that specialize in task management. Some popular online task managers include Remember the Milk, Todoist, Hi Task, Task Freak, Nozbe and Toodledo.
  • Services like Appointy allow you to not only manage, but also schedule appointments for your business.
  • For many of us, keeping our co-workers informed about where we are at and what we are doing is near impossible. Usually a quick text message or Twitter status update will suffice, but if not you might consider using Yammer, Identa.ca or Status.net.

Online Marketing:

This is a pretty expansive topic and I am not even really to sure where I should start. The problem with marketing is that it gets really expensive, really quickly. Many large corporations spend millions of dollars a year just in marketing their products or services online. Thanks to the web 2.0, we can market our own businesses online without spending a dime and still get great exposure.

I should mention that there are a number of great link building articles right here on Geek Estate, example 1, 2 and 3. There are also a lot of free resources online that you can use to market your business. Let me give you some ideas:

Conference Calling:

I don’t know about you, but I try to avoid costly phone bills at all expenses. Maybe that’s why some of these services exist today:

What Online Services Have Simplified Your Life?

Believe me, I know that the web 2.0 service hasn’t even been broken with the above list, there are thousands more services and resources where these came from. Maybe I will save the others for another round-up of web 2.0 goodies, but for now, why not share the services that you are using these days!

I look forward to reading your comments below…