Have you ever needed to make a file available to anyone on the internet? Maybe it's a flyer that you want everyone to see. It could be an image that you want to use on a website or in your email signature.

Making a file available on the internet for anyone to view and download is called hosting.

Once a file is hosted, it can be viewed, downloaded, and displayed on webpages and email signatures. Typically, you would purchase web hosting from the same companies that you purchase domain names from, such as GoDaddy or 1&1, for an additional monthly or yearly fee. Now with cloud storage services such as Dropbox and Google Drive, your files are already hosted online, so it's just a matter of directing people to those files.

To use a hosted file in a website or email signature, you need the direct link.

A direct link is the URL that points directly to your file hosted online. By "directly", I mean no additional "junk" around the file. No webpage code, just the file, thanks. For a file to have a direct link, it needs to be hosted and publicly available online. Once you have the direct link to a hosted file, you can paste it anywhere online (including in the right place your email signature) for people to view or download the file.

The instructions below will tell you how to get the direct link to your files in Google Drive so use can use them online where you need them. You can do this with Dropbox as well, but the instructions will be different.

Google is most known for its search, so it stands to reason that Google's Gmail must have pretty amazing search functionality, and it does. And now that your KW email account is managed by Google, you'll have 30 gigabytes to fill up with tons of emails. Compared to the 250 megabytes KW email had before, that's 120x more room for email and all of their attachments. It's a good thing you'll have the power of Google's search for your mail, and now you're going to need to know how to use it.

Gmail's advanced search uses operators to search your mail for specific pieces of metadata. Things can get geeky very fast, so you'll want to start with some basic searches—like searching for mail from a specific person, for a phrase in the subject, or for emails with attachments. Once you become a power-user, you'll be using Boolean searches, and searching your mail for emails older than a year that you haven't read with attachments larger than 10 megabytes!

As a real estate agent, you're expected to be an expert on your city. With Google Alerts, you can be alerted to new events in your city, or even new search results about you or your website! By entering search terms (just as you would when doing a Google search) into Google Alerts, and setting how often you want results, you can have new Google search results delivered to your email inbox.

Most new agents are using their eEdge website instead of the older eAgentC websites. The problem is, by default, your KW.com Agent Profile is set to link to your eAgentC site. When clients view your public Agent Profile the-] KW.com website, they are being directed to your eAgentC page (even if you've never set it up). To change the site that your KW agent profile links to, all you need to do is make a change in your eAgentC settings.

Every agent gets two websites, an eEdge and eAgentC website. However, each agent actually gets a third website, and that's an agent's KW.com profile page. In an agent's Whitepages profile settings is the option to set a display URL which is much like a Facebook vanity URL or LinkedIn public profile name. Instead of having a long, unmemorable URL, setting a custom display URL means having an easy-to-remember URL pointing to your KW.com agent profile.