I think Active Rain is a wonderful site that gives real value to everyone who uses it’s platform to blog. Realtors all over the country use Active Rain to blog. As of this writing, there are over 138,000 members. I’m a member and I have written many blog articles on Active Rain. There are wonderful tools available to Realtors, Mortgage Brokers, Builders, Home Inspectors…you name it. There is a wealth of information available for members as well as the general public. Because of Active Rain, I have listed properties.
If you are a Realtor and you are not on Active Rain, I think you are making a big mistake. If you are a Realtor and you are only on Active Rain, you are making a big mistake. Active Rain should supplement your blogging endeavors, not be the one and only. Practice on Active Rain and perfect your style of blogging. You will be critiqued by other members who read your articles. You will be praised or you could be scolded. It’s a great learning environment.
Own your own blog and your own content! I cannot stress this enough. If you read the terms of service on Active Rain you will understand what I just said. Active Rain owns their site. Active Rain owns all of the content placed on their site. The following statement appears in the terms of service:
ActiveRain also reserves the right to cancel the account of any member it believes may be engaging in infringement of the rights of others, copyright violation, or any inappropriate behavior. We also reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to terminate your access to all or part of the ActiveRain Community for any reason or no reason , or without notice.
Active Rain can terminate your account at anytime for any reason at all. If you have built a significant part of your business on Active Rain and you are terminated, you are in a world of hurt. If you have placed links all over the internet to your Active Rain blog and it disappears, so could part of your business. It appears to me that many, many Realtors use Active Rain as their only blogging platform. They make great claims as to the business they receive from their Active Rain blog. When I look at their personal web sites they list in their profiles, it takes me to a cold corporate site that I have absolutely no reason to read. If this is you, you better have a backup plan.
I will close with the following statement. Active Rain is a wonderful site and if you are a Realtor, you should probably be on it. That’s a personal judgement call. If you do not have your own blog site that you control 100% of the site and content, you are asking for trouble. If you’re a Realtor, you need a separate blog on your own hosting plan on a domain name that you own. Consider it real estate that you own and this piece of real estate can never be foreclosed on unless you say so. By owning your own site, you will gain strength, traffic and page rank with Google and the other search engines. Do you realize how valuable this can be to your business over time? Extremely valuable. It only cost $10 to get started. If I visit your AR Profile page will I find a link to your personal blog? I recommend Wordpress as a blogging platform. This blog you are reading is built on Wordpress. For hosting I recommend BLUEHOST.COM.
Coming soon on NC Realtors Who Blog: A review of the Kodak Zi6 flip camera. Why every Realtor should own a flip camera.
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This entry was written by , posted on March 10, 2009 at 9:02 am, filed under NC Realtors and tagged Active Rain, bluehost, nc association of realtors, nc brokers, nc mls, nc mls listings, NC Realtor, NC Realtors, north carolina realtor, north carolina realtors, realtors north carolina, realtors of nc, wordpress. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
[...] Free Wordpress Blog Setup Many Realtors have do not have blogs. Many Realtors have corporate sites that do not include blogs. Many Realtors have blogs on Active Rain. If you fall into one of these categories, your competition is loving it. Owning your own blog and content is a small price to pay for the possible big returns. Did you know that if you blog on Active Rain, you do not own your own content? You may want to read this article. [...]
[...] a very visible link to his blog. This is where a client decides to make a call or click away. In my previous article about Active Rain, I have some real concerns for any real estate agent to put all of their blogging eggs in one [...]
[...] David’s contact information is easily found. David also blogs on Active Rain. I’ve posted an article about Active Rain here on this site. Active Rain is great but I do warn of placing all of your eggs [...]
I totally agree with you. I just signed up for an Activerain blog but have maintained my personally owned, multiple blogs at http://www.teammcneil.com/blog and http://www.loftstyle.ca/blog for several years now. My loftstyle.ca blog is brand new.
Thanks for the post!
Warren