Time is money, right? Using these tools can save you many hours monthly for far better things—like selling!

Save Time – Avoid Filling Out Forms Repeatedly

Tired of typing your contact and credit card information onto web forms over and over and over and over? Yuk! Never again! There’s a free software program from Gator.com that remembers your contact and credit card info---then automatically fills out forms that require this info for you with no typing. It works, too. Ten million people have already downloaded it.

Gator remembers log-ons and passwords automatically; protects and encrypts your data (only on your own computer for maximum privacy). It also shows you some shopping items occasionally, but never intrusively or too much. And, you can set it up to remember the specific information for more than one user, thus making it great for husband/wife teams.

Gator is definitely a must for busy web surfers or anyone who routinely has to log on to a number of sites before entering them. I cannot tell you how many hours a month gator has saved me since the first of the year. It’s one of the most brilliant and useful web tools I’ve ever seen!

Save Time Doing Your Online Research

Google.com is the best search engine on the Web. It accesses nearly 1.4 billion Web pages, far more than any other engine. Better yet, it ranks and displays sites based on their popularity---on how many links there are on “related and important” web sites that point people to a given site.

In other words, if you have lotsa links on other web sites that point people to your site, you have a “popular” site and are likely to come up high on Google. Popularity, many feel, may be the most accurate determinant of which sites are best per given search.

Want to see how popular your site is by counting how many links point to it? Just go to Linkstoyou.com and see. Just for fun, enter www.realtor.com or www.realtytimes.com or any of your other favorite sites and see the humongous numbers of links pointing to these really popular sites.

Google has recently blessed us! Now you can add the Google search to your browser, so that it’s with you wherever you go on the web. Moreover, just like Gator, the toolbar is entirely free.

Google says: “The new Google Toolbar increases your ability to find information from anywhere on the web and takes only seconds to install. When the Google Toolbar is installed, it automatically appears along with the Internet Explorer toolbar. This means you can quickly and easily use Google to search from any website location, without returning to the Google home page to begin another search.”

Look what the toolbar lets you do:

• Google Search: Access Google's search technology from any web page.
• Search Site: Search only the pages of the site you're visiting.
• PageRank: See Google's ranking of the current page.
• Page Info: Access more information about a page including similar pages, pages that link back to that page, as well as a cached snapshot.
• Highlight: Highlight your search terms as they appear on the page; each word in its own color.
• Word Find: Find your search terms wherever they appear on the page.

I’ve had the Google Toolbar tacked onto my Internet Explorer Browser for about a month now, and just love its convenience. So will you. Not only will you be using the world’s best search engine, you can use it now from anywhere. To learn more, visit Google’s FAQ page.

Published: April 11, 2001

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Bill Koelzer is a Web marketing consultant to web-proficient agents nationwide. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall books, Internet Marketing in Real Estate and Internet Marketing. Bill is also webmaster of Orange County Real Estate, among the most-awarded known Realtor® sites. Visit his website, Koelzer.com or e-mail him at .