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LITTLE did I know a year and a half ago when I started using a new home page that I had one of the most powerful marketing tools I've ever used right in my browser.

Netvibes is an AJAX-enabled start page that lets you put all your favorite RSS feeds and widgets of popular sites like Myspace, Facebook, Answers and Gmail in one place.
From the moment I started using it, I was thrilled. I eagerly put a widget of all my favorite bookmarks on my page, as well as my email account, calendar and to-do lists. It was clear immediately that Netvibes could save you an hour a day by letting you access all your favorite web properties quickly and easily.

Back then, I made my living selling wholesale items on eBay, so saving an hour a day was more than enough to convince me to dump my internet training wheels, My Yahoo.

Saving time was great, but it wasn't until I had decided to start my own marketing company and delve into the world of blogging that I began to see the true power of Netvibes. By creating multiple tabs, Netvibes allows you to segment your market and keep an eye on others in your niche.

I named my first page Yourica, after a web application I had been (and still am) working on.

I filled it with every feed I could find from that particular niche and quickly became very knowledgeable on the topic. In a way, the ease of having so many resources organized in one place was what led me to blogging. Every time I found a blog I was enthusiastic about, I'd gather the top 20 or so blogs from that niche and dive in. After about a year, I had learned enough about the blogosphere to gain the confidence to start blogging myself.

First up was Dadviser. At the time, I had made the decision to reprioritize my life and make parenting my passion. As a new single father, there were so many questions I had about being a better dad and understanding the legal issues involved, so sharing what I was learning with others was a perfect fit. After some thought, I bought a domain name I thought had some long-term branding potential, studied and decided on a Content Management System and got some hosting space. I was on my way.

As I built the site, it soon became apparent that my newsreader was getting too bloated for its own good. Not only did I have all my Yourica feeds, but I was also hording every good parenting and blogging blog I could find. That's when my internet browsing experience changed forever. With the click of a button, I opened a second tab, named it Dadviser and moved all the parenting and blogging feeds over to that tab.

As an information junky, I was hooked. After a few weeks, I was dragging and dropping over 40 feeds on that tab alone and reveling in how much info you could intake when it's smartly organized to your taste. It was like having a digital daily newsletter of your entire niche.

Once I got Dadviser up and running and got in the habit of regularly posting, I was hooked. Even though my reading list had ballooned out of control, I somehow convinced myself that I was still saving time and began laying the groundwork for some other blogs. As a firm believer in the power of people that believe in themselves, I began to collect feeds on topics that would inspire people to follow their dreams. My third tab was now born, and after a few months of studying and brainstorming, I came up with a name for it: 1-Man-Brand.

I also figured it couldn't hurt to learn the other popular content management systems, so this time I chose Joomla. The site is live, but I'm having a little design work done on it so I've been writing posts and gathering content offline. Not being able to post online just wasn't the same for me. It was obvious, the blogging bug had truly bitten.

Slowed but not deterred, I used the down time wisely. I slowly started to build a bigger picture that would incorporate all of my projects in one. Maybe I was thinking a little too ambitious, but blogging will do that to you. Take a look around the blogosphere and you'll see those bitten by the blogging bug everywhere, but the passion I feel for each of my topics leads me to believe I'm on to something. Just two short years out of the only office job I've ever had, I was now running my own small marketing firm, evangelizing for fathers on Dadviser and ramping up to launch a blog about turning your dreams into reality, a thought that was actually coming true in my own life.

The circle was slowly beginning to connect. I'd use my marketing skill and education to not only make a living, but to market my blogs and perhaps more importantly, myself. I had begun to slowly build income through Dadviser talking about the issues that mattered most to me. And I am about to launch a site that not only ties them together, but allows me the opportunity to use my own life and experiences as the case study for the topic I'd be covering. Once the vision was clear in my mind, I knew I needed to get organized and start to slowly build a marketing campaign around this big picture. Thus was born a fourth and fifth tab, one for my marketing company and one for a parent company for all the other projects to huddle around.

Now that my gameplan has been formulated, I've added a Myspace profile for each project and placed them on the corresponding Netvibes tab. I narrowed down the feeds I was subscribing to on each tab, added Gmail, to-do lists and contact widgets in an attempt to make each tab uniform, and added a sixth tab for my Meebo account. I then started adding groups and friends to my Myspace accounts and now with the push of a button, have an instant audience for any or all of my projects. The best part is that without ever leaving Netvibes, I can keep track of others in my niches, keep an eye on my email accounts, see all the latest comments and blog posts from my Myspace friends and keep track of my marketing clients. For a free application, I was definitely getting a great return on my marketing dollars and still saving time, though much of that is lost networking with associates on Meebo, once again right from the friendly confines of my Netvibes universe.

Now that just about every website, blog or not, has RSS feeds, you can basically keep tabs on the entire internet from your start page. I've tried Pageflakes and Google Reader, but in my opinion, they pale in comparison to Netvibes' smooth interface, vast library of widgets and versatility. When one of my clients has a large project, I manage it through Netvibes even though I've tried most of the free project management applications like Zoho, Basecamp and 8 Apps. Netvibes is more than a project management application. It's a marketing tool, a social network, a customizable organizer and a personalized portal to the web. In short, it's a way of life.

DAD TALK

* What do you use as your start page?
* Are you a blogger? If so, how do you keep track of the other bloggers in your niche?
* How do you organize and harness the power of multiple social networks?

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