About Us

Advantages of 123notary.com - Geography.

(1) 123notary.com goes the extra mile by having subcounties and supercounties in many states. A subcounty is a part of a county. Many California counties are simply too populated with notaries, so, search results are better by dividing counties into smaller areas. That way you still get a good selection of notaries, but get them where you need them, instead of in the far corner of that county 90 miles away from where your borrower is. In remote areas of Texas and other mid-American states, we have supercounties which are clusters of counties. That way, if a notary serves one of the counties in the cluster, the browser would be able to find them by looking up any of the counties in the cluster. Your chances of finding someone would increase that way.

(2) Our zip search was modified in 2006 to have customizable radiuses. We show all local notaries in order of p# ( preference number ) in the first tier of search results. Congested areas like Los Angeles or New York might have a six mile radius of zips that would show local notaries in the first tier of results, while remote areas might have an eighteen mile tier. This way you get a good amount of choices across the board. Generally, not too many choices, and not too few.

(3) You can lookup by city, as well as county, state, and zip on 123notary.com giving you many choices. Looking up by city will forward you to the county or other general area page you are looking for. However, we have a filter that can show you ONLY those who are in the city of your choice.

(4) Bilingual notaries can be searched by language name in the geographic area of your choice too!

About Us Commentary from Autumn 2007

How we started 123notary.com was created by Jeremy Belmont in the ahses of the dot-com bust of 2000. Jeremy started by creating 123notary.com to assist him in advertising his own personal notary services. Jeremy found that the site was a powerful tool and should be shared with other notaries.

Growth history The site gradually branched out from being a Los Angeles site, to including surrounding counties. A few months later grew to include all of California. Then Jeremy said to himself, "Thing big, thing big, go nationwide". After a few more months and much dialogue with programmers, Jeremy started to serve the whole nation. The problem was, how to populate all states with notaries. Jeremy and co-workers had to call notaries all around the country to beg them to be on 123notary.com and got many great notaries on board ( the hard way ). Since then, business has been running smoothly and 123notary.com has had over 10,200 signups and has roughly 4500 notaries currently on board which is excellent.

Innovations
123notary.com has gone through many tough changes.

Cities - In 2001, Jeremy had to find all the cities and towns in the whole United States and add them to the database. Each city had to be asociated with a county which involved a lot of manual work and database programming which was time consuming and expensive.

Neighboring counties - There was also a system for identifying neighboring counties for most counties in the United States which is a very helpful feature, but took a lot of manual work to create.

Placement options - Later on, the idea of having different placement options came to be. Many people wanted to pay a higher fee to have higher placements. After a while, it became clear that many notaries wanted "fixed" placement, meaning that they wanted to know exactly how they would be placed. After some analysis, it became clear that selling top spot for a fixed price nationwide made no sense, so Jeremy devised a forumula to have pricing based on the supply and demand of an area. A top position in Kansas would be really inexpensive, while a top spot in Miami would cost more than five times that of Kansas.

Additional counties - After more consideration, it became evident, that the additional counties that many notaries had needed, to be at different placements than their home area for the quality of the site. The reason being that if an additional area had regular placement, it would interphere with locals in those other areas who also had regular placement. So, in March of 2007, it became a policy on 123notary.com that additional areas of notaries would have low placement ( unless the notary paid for a fixed position on that area ), so that the locals would show up higher which would be a huge convenience to the browser.

Zip radius - 123notary.com used to have an eight mile zip radius nationwide. Notaries within eight miles would show up in the first tier of results in order of what type of listing they had ( high p#'s on top ). It became clear that urban searches yielded far too many choices and that narrowing down the radius would have a more targetted and focused search result. Rural areas had too few search results per tier, hence, widening the results would produce more choices per tier. It took much programming and manual work to sort through the 1000 - three digit zip prefixes and assign them each a radius, one by one.

The forum - The 123notary.com discussion forum has been in existance since 2004. However, Jeremy felt that it would take a long time to become popular which turned out to be a correct assumption. Jeremy just let it sit there for a year and a half and many people signed up but growth was slow. After a while, Jeremy began to find new and innovative ways to promote the forum which worked. Gradually, the forum is becoming more and more popular, although its a never-ending endeavor.

The future - 123notary.com will contiue to innovate its way into the future. As time progresses, there will be periodical new features and offerings on 123notary.com, as well as some new webdesign work too.

Archives from 2001 - 2002

Growing Pains: 123Notary is going National!

Our success with our California Locate-A-Notary service has been phenominal. What else could we do but go national?

We're adding states gradually, with present emphasis on the western states, as notary.notaries register with 123Notary.

As of March, 2002, 123Notary.com is specializing in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. Soon we will also be specializing in Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. So, if you are a California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, New York, or a mobile notary public in any of the other states we mentioned, our site is an excellent way for you to market your services.

What's Special About 123Notary?

As a practicing traveling notary in the Los Angeles region, I have long felt that the available notary-search

web-sites were not what the industry needed. I determined to build a more useful one.

To see how 123Notary works, click on "Find A Notary" at the left and then on "New Jersey". You will see how 123Notary provides a notary-locator based on CITY, COUNTY (or other large region), in some cases also on AREAS (subdivisions of COUNTIES), and also by BILINGUAL ability.

Note: when you click on the name of a city you will be forwarded to an area or county which contains that city. 123Notary expects that the notaries listed for that area or county should be able to serve all the cities of that area or county.

Advantages of 123Notary: Geography

Search sites that allow search by cities generally find too few notaries. Search sites that allow search by large regions such as counties generally find too many notary.notaries . I have opted for a middle ground. 123Notary divides states into counties (or other large regions) and, when there are enough notary.notaries registered, subdivides counties into smaller areas.

To help with sparcely populated counties, 123Notary lists, with each county, neighboring counties whose notary.notaries might be of assistance. Similarly, for counties which are subdivided into smaller areas, 123Notary lists, with each such smaller area, neighboring smaller areas.

Advantages of 123Notary: Bilingual notary.notaries

123Notary registers notary.notaries as bilingual upon their claim to conduct notarial business in one or more languages other than English. All the bilingual notary.notaries within a county are listed on a per-county bilingual-notaries page. The bilingual page for a county is accessible from the county's main page and from all smaller area pages (if the county is subdivided into smaller areas).

Acknowledgements

Design work on the 123Notary web-site has been provided by its web-master, Mitch Wooley, E-Marketing Associates, (626)444-9111. Programming for automated web-page production has been provided by Peter Belmont, (718)596-2648.

As of March, 2002, 123Notary.com is specializing in Arizona, California, Idaho, Montana, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming. We will be specializing in Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania soon too. So, if you are a California, Florida, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, or a mobile notary public in any of the other states we mentioned, our site is an excellent way for you to market your services.