markgalloway.com

It’s always fun to find a new way to perform a routine, mundane task. Searching for real estate online often fits this description. That’s why Trulia’s new whizbang toy is so fun! It’s called TruliaSnapshot and it’s a neat mashup between Trulia and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But what better way to explain it than to show it to you.

Here’s a 3 minute screencast of TruliaSnapshot I made.

Try it out for yourself at www.snapshot.trulia.com.

Real estate professionals: I mention in the video the importance of getting your listings onto Trulia so that they can appear on TruliaSnapshot, as well as their main site. The best way I know of to do is by syndicating your listings using vFlyer. I’ll be posting a comprehensive overview of vFlyer soon, but for a teaser if you go to vFlyer.com and subscribe to one of their paid accounts, you can get a 10% discount by using the discount code: mountainmarkg.

Basic plans start at $12.95 and are one of the best investments individual agents and brokers can make to get MASSIVE online exposure for your listings. As I said, I’ll write much more about vFlyer and other listing distribution options very soon.

One of the tedious aspects of selling online is getting your product photos to look their very best without wasting a lot of time. Having spent hours making pictures look “just right” prior to launching an eBay listing or posting an item to Craigslist, I was intrigued to try out Bling! It, a new photo editing application designed specifically for eCommerce sellers.

From their site:

Bling! It is designed for everyone from the novice user to businessperson and web designer, Bling! It sets the new standard for web product shots and can quickly replace everyday backgrounds with professional ones, sharpen and enhance a product’s appearance, and optimize the shot for auction sites such as eBay and Amazon, or any eCommerce website.

• Simple Step-by-Step Actions. With first time users in mind, Bling! It takes difficult tasks and makes them quick and easy. Using step-by-step actions and simple to understand features Bling It is so easy to use and quick to learn that soon all web shots will be Bling!-ed!
• 4 Times Faster Than Other Methods. Using the latest and most advanced imaging technology, Bling! It reduces the time taken to create professional web ready product shots from everyday ones to less than a quarter of what was achievable before!
• Removing Old Backgrounds Is as Easy as Painting By Numbers! An overlay of lines tracing all key edges in the image acts line masking tape and outlines the product in the image – making separating the product from the background as easy as painting by numbers!
• See Backgrounds Disappear in Real-time. Using the “Paintaway Viewer”. Bling! It offers peace of mind by showing background removal in the Paintaway Viewer in real-time.

Recently, I tried out a free trial of Bling! It They give you a 15 day free trial to evaluate it prior to purchase and it didn’t take more than an hour to see the value in this product.

Before explaining what it is, here’s what it isn’t – a full-blown photo editor. I’d refer to it more as a photo enhancer, or maybe a photo optimizer. Bling! It will let you take an image you snapped in the laundry room, with your mousetraps and floor cleaner in the background, and make it look like it was shot in a studio, with the nasty background magically removed. Basically, it makes your stuff look “professional”.

Furthermore, the developer claims that Bling! It users experience higher click through rates and a 20% increase in sales.

It can’t magically take a bad photo and make it good. In other words, you still need to take a good quality, in-focus picture. For regular photo editing, I’d suggest using FotoFlexer.com or Picnik.com.

What Bling! It does do, is give you pictures that look like they’ve been PhotoShopped without taking more than a couple minutes of your time. This is fast image editing!

Also, in addition to the backgrounds that Bling! It magically places behind your item, you can highlight specific features, sharpen the image, , add your logo, create a shadow and enhance the image resolution. You can control the saved file size as well and utilize the presets designed to optimize the image size for the specific site you plan to sell on, like eBay, Amazon, GunLocker, etc.

You can also use Bling! It for your profile images used on your favorite social networks. This could be particularly useful if you had a nice snapshot of yourself at a party or other social event, but don’t want all the background imagery (like the drunk guy on the pool table behind you.)

For an example of what Bling! It can accomplish, the picture on the left is a generic snapshot of a vanity/dresser we want to sell, just as it sits in the garage, waiting for a new owner.

After loading the picture into Bling! It and selecting a good background and sharpening the image, I now have the picture on the right. This took about 5 minutes to do and I didn’t really read the directions ahead of time.

Now obviously no miracles occurred to make the vanity look better. But the background sure does and it makes the photo look more like a studio image than a shot snapped in the garage.

Here’s a screencast I made showing how easy and fast this is to use. (Pardon my cough…..argghhh, Allergies!) To watch, just click the window.

For $49.95 I think Bling! It is a good value for anyone selling personal property items online. I don’t think I would use it for real estate, but for everything else I might sell on eBay or Amazon, it’s a worthwhile tool. I would consider it essential if you’re a regular online seller.

To try out Bling! It for yourself, click HERE