I just got back from a real estate conference, and never wrote a note! Last week I taught a class at my office on Using Evernote for Real Estate. The objective was to use your smartphone or tablet for our upcoming conference and leave your laptop at home so you could go paperless. At least for me, this proved to be successful.

Objectives of Going Paperless

The best part about going paperless at a conference included:

• Easy to read notes
• Ability to quickly share notes with others
• Ability to upload slides to the same note for reminders
• Add photos of speaker and attendees for social media sharing and future blog posts

I created a note for each session in Evernote and was able to tag it with the keywords important to me for future search. I used several formatting options for lists and call-outs, which I could have done writing the notes, but some of these were after-thoughts and would have meant rewriting my notes – which of course, would be counter-productive.

I liked that I could photograph slides and presenters, and add them to my note. And using Skitch, could even make notes on the photos.

And then is the ability to quickly share my notes with others I work with so that we could each attend different sessions and still benefit from the information right away. No waiting until we get home to copy and download to a shared file, or make copies for others.

Another great benefit is that when the presenter mentioned and article, I could use clipper to add a link in my note as well. And of course, I could add a clickable link to any websites mentioned.

How to Use Evernote

Using Evernote is easy! It works on your desktop, tablet and smartphone. The user interface is different on a PC and Mac, so if you switch between technology (like me), it can be confusing sometimes until you are more comfortable with it.

For the purposes of conferences, and ultimately for a paperless office, we will focus on Notes and Notebooks.

I recommended the following notebooks for immediate use at the conference, and then for future use when we returned:

• .inbox
• KWFR (conference notes)
• Buyers
• Sellers

The KWFR file was for the notes we would take at Keller Williams Family Reunion. Each note would be titled with the name of the session. This would make it easy to navigate later on.

To create a notebook:

Once you click on the + sign to create a new note:

• click your mouse on the Title and start typing
• tab to begin typing
• be sure to click SAVE one time to save your note

Tags

One of the benefits of using tags is that you can quickly search notes for topics you are interested in. While this is a great way to organize information, too many tags will quickly become overwhelming. Create a list of key topics you want to know about and use those as your tags, for example:

• Lead generation
• Marketing
• Prospecting
• Buyers
• Sellers
• CRM
• Transaction Management
• Social Media

To tag your note for future reference:

You can even create a note for tags so that you can refer to it as a reminder of tags you have created. This will help eliminate duplication like buyer and buyers.

Assign Notes to Notebooks

Once you create a note, you may want to “file” it in a notebook, instead of the inbox.

Just click on the notebook you want to move your note to. This will place it in that notebook. So as you attend new sessions, make sure to save the notes to the conference notebook.

Share Notes and Notebooks

You can quickly share your notes and notebooks during the conference or afterwards. If everyone is using Evernote, you can share the notebook and then as new notes are created in the notebook, they will be shared with anyone that you share the notebook with. If you only want to share specific notes, make sure you only select share on those, instead of sharing the entire notebook.

As you see, you can also share with social media platforms.

That’s it for notes and notebooks right now. Try it out before I teach you some of the other things you can do like adding files, images, etc. And some great apps that you can use with Evernote to make it even better!

Let me know how you are doing.