ActiveRain - The Official ActiveBlog

Intermixed with the daily struggle of running a company that is grasping for revenues, in what seems like a never ending attempt to bridge that last little gap to profitability, I am blessed with inspiring messages from the members of this network about how ActiveRain is impacting their lives.

My most recent inspiration came from an article authored by Russ Ravary and the accompanying comments on it. Whenever I am in a certain mood, and read one of these posts, I am reminded that ActiveRain is something greater than just a business. I am elevated above the grind-level view of daily operations, and if only for a few fleeting minutes, I recognize the incredible opportunity we have in front of us to change, and improve, the way an entire industry operates. Indeed we are doing something even more than revolutionizing an industry in need of change; we are enriching the lives of our fellow colleagues and creating one of the greatest caring communities in the world. 

We are a part of something that is quite rare, something that is both exciting and humbling at the same time.

I am often charged with answering the question, "What is ActiveRain?", and now even after years of running the company I haven't been able to articulate an answer that seems sufficient. ActiveRain is clearly more than just a business; It seems to mean something powerful and slightly different to everyone who embraces it and makes it a part of their lives. Recognizing this, I would like to turn the question over to the individual members of this community to answer in the comments below.

My hope is that in the future when someone wants to know "What is ActiveRain", I can point them here.

What does ActiveRain mean to you? How has it impacted your life. How has it helped your business?

All of these suggestions are free to implement and will generate very high quality incoming links and a pretty healthy amount of traffic.

You can use your ActiveRain profile just fine with each of these items but you will likely generate the best results with your own Individual Blog. (If you don't have an Individual Blog yet click here to get one.)

Please note that pretty much all of the items below require that you have a free account with the applicable website.

1. Submit yourself to Google Local. Make sure to put in your blog or profile URL in the website entry form field.

2. Add your blog to Local.Yahoo.com.

3. Submit your blog to Yelp! 

4. Create a blog post for everyone of your listings and submit the URL to Google Base.

5. Create a blog post for everyone of your listings and submit the URL to Craigslist.

6. Add links to your website, ActiveRain profile, and your Individual blog, on your LinkedIn profile page.  Your LinkedIn profile is second only to your ActiveRain profile in terms of Google Juice.

7. Add yourself to YellowPages.com. The search engines tap this database to populate their Local search results.

(The cow above looks very dominating; similar to the way you will look to your competitors if you implement these strategies.  In case you were wondering, that is why I chose it as the picture for this post.)

I started my first real mini-business in 1994 when I was still in high school. It was called Paradigm Interactive Media (pimedia.com) and we were a web site development company. Since I didn't know anything about developing websites, my job was to go out and sell the websites to local business; jewelery shops, hair salons, restaurants, etc. 

Every time I entered one of those businesses looking for a sale, I was terrified.

Right after high school, my family went through some financial setbacks and I wanted to do what I could to help, so I got my real estate license and started to sell houses. 

Every listing appointment and each time I met with a buyer, I was terrified.

After some time I got less terrified being a real estate agent and actually got kind of good at it, so I decided it was time to push myself one-step further and I recruited a group of my peers and created a real estate brokerage. 

I bootstrapped the brokerage and grew it while being incredibly underfunded. Because I didn't has sufficient credit, capital, or experience to license a franchise, I created the company as an independent; without any sort of support infrastructure I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Every day going into the office I was terrified, but I went in anyways.

One thing led to another and now I find myself running a business that is blazing a trail of innovation and yet at the same time foraging for survival. Everyday I am charged to do at least one thing that is well beyond my knowledge level, skill level, talent level, or experience level; often times it is beyond my level on all four fronts. But I do that thing anyways. I put myself into the position that I have no choice but show up and do my best. Calling in sick is not an option.

I show up to work and don't know what the day will bring. I try things where the outcome is unknown. I am terrified everyday, but I would have it no other way.

Next week I will be speaking to the NAR Strategic Planning Committee in Washington DC.  The committee consists of all of the NAR top brass and other influential leaders.  I am putting together my presentation this weekend and I want to reach out to our membership to see what types of things you would like addressed with our leadership.

Please think big. My sole focus in going to Washington DC is to speak on behalf of our members and I am not afraid to be bold.

To learn more about the NAR's current Strategic Plan click here: http://www.realtor.org/research/research/strategicplanning

I asked our team to come up with a mission statement today.  Although they were not very happy with the short deadline, on a Friday no less, they all pitched in and came up with some good ideas. Now I am taking these ideas to our membership to help us refine what we currently have and hopefully eventually derive at the perfect statement that crystallizes where we will take our network.

The only parameters that I established was that it must be shorter than 30 words.

Here are some of the possibilities our team came up with:

1. ActiveRain is the Leading Social Network for Real Estate Professionals whose primary goal is to provide an effective platform that allows its member to generate quality consumer-oriented content, establishing their role as a knowledgeable local expert, and connecting them with potential clients.

2. To allow real estate professionals to connect with consumers by highlighting their real estate expertise and local knowledge while learning techniques that will make them successful in today's market.

3. ActiveRain is a Social Network that enables real estate professionals to connect with consumers and exchange ideas with peers through dynamic conversations about their local markets and personal expertise.

4. As the largest and fastest growing Professional Real Estate Network in the Country, it's our mission to provide a secure and professional platform for our members, and to be the Industry Leader in the markets we serve.

5. To help real estate professionals grow their careers, connect with peers and customers, and become respected local experts.

6. ActiveRain: for when life moves you to connect, share, and grow.

Mike, one of our developer's, offered this note along with his mission statement submission. I think he is very insightful so I am passing it onto you as a bonus of sorts:

"Our members clearly believe participating in ActiveRain is good for their careers.  They're right.  When they take an active part in our service (ActiveRain), they establish relationships with others in the industry, create a body of work through their blog entries, learn occupational tips and tricks, receive encouragement, get inspired, establish a reputation, even get occasional leads.  As long as we help them to achieve these things for themselves, we'll be successful and well-regarded.

ActiveRain moves fast.  So fast that I know of only a few people who really have a clear picture of everything that ActiveRain has to offer.  AR is now averaging a site upgrade at least once a week.  To put that in proper context, most software companies are on a quarterly or 1/2 yearly deployment schedule. 

We've done five separate deploys in the last 10 days alone, so I thought it would be beneficial to do a high level overview of the different products and services available on ActiveRain, while focusing on our core business components.

1. Blogging:  There is a major shift from the traditional way real estate is marketed and blogging represents this new paradigms epicenter.

In the past advertising options included post cards and newspaper advertising with canned messages, listing magazines with latent information, nothing that provided any real testament to who the real estate professional really is.   ActiveRain continues to evolve a social media publishing (or blog) platform where real estate professionals can share their expertise and knowledge while creating a conversation with potential clients.

Our blogging platform will focus on empowering our members to syndicate their data to as many consumers as possible, involving integration with other highly trafficked sites.  Some of the sites I would like to see us work close with this year include: the major real estate brokerages, Zillow, Trulia, Yahoo, and Microsoft.  

(This feature of ActiveRain is Free)

2. Referral Exchange: Best ActiveRain resource that you haven't heard of. 

The basic premise behind the Referral Exchange is, you guessed it, a marketplace where real estate professionals can exchange referrals with ease and efficiency.  We launched it over a year ago without much fanfare as a fix for the frustration I experienced when needing to personally refer business out of state.  Finding a hard working and appreciative professional was a lot harder than it should have been.  The Exchange recently reappeared on my radar after I heard a series of fantastic success stories.

Using the Referral Exchange is simple and free.

Once a referral is added to the system an email is sent to all members on ActiveRain that have an alert set up that matches the parameters of the referral.  New members are setup with a basic referral alert at registration.  To change your alert settings click here

(This feature of ActiveRain is Free)

In the next few months we plan to implement a new element to the Referral Exchange product that will require all outbound referrals to be screened before it hits the board to eliminate any spam.

3. Profile:  You don't get a second chance to make a first impression...

For those who don't believe in the power of the ActiveRain profile, take a moment and Google your name.  Unless it's Brad Pitt, (or you've been on ActiveRain for just a short while) you will likely find your ActiveRain profile on Page 1 of your search results.  And even if it doesn't show up on page 1, it's information that consumers are highly interested in.  Take time to make your profile read and look beautiful.  When I practiced real estate I always considered myself unemployed and on a never-ending quest to find a new job. Your profile is your resume. Treat it with the respect it deserves. 

(This feature of ActiveRain is Free)

4. Individual & Team Blogs: Almost 10 years ago I created the first Search Engine Optimized IDX website that used listing content to generate long tail search results.  This innovation eventually allowed my team of real estate agents to generate over 5,000 leads a month and sell well over $100 million dollars in real estate a year. 

I believe our new ActiveBlogs are as powerful today as my SEO IDX website was back when I first created it. If used correctly, ActiveBlogs have the potential to revolutionize personal, team, office, and/or niche real estate production.  

The core value proposition of our blogs is an infrastructure that we call RAIndexing, or "Real Area Indexing".   Simply put, your blog turns into a long tail Search Engine Optimized website. Similar in nature to the SEO IDX website, the primary difference being the IDX website uses static listing content whereas ActiveBlogs utilize much more potent unique, fresh content.

We have a giant office whiteboard full of improvements that will continuously be released for the ActiveBlog platform.  For example, we just added the ability for people to add a Listing Router search widget to ActiveBlogs. In the next few weeks look for "New Theme Friday's", and a widget integration.  To sign up for an ActiveBlog click here.  

(ActiveBlogs cost $19/mo and $79/mo for an Individual and Team license respectively)

5. Localism: Localism is designed to be the worlds most complete Neighborpedia. 

Members may sponsor communities, cities and even sub-divisions on Localism.  The concept is based on a verb we call "localised", which is the process of adding location based meta-data to content, whether it be text, pictures or video.  The website is designed to exclusively feature 'hyper-local' real estate information for consumers.  Focused hyper-local content from an established and trusted website ranks inherently high on search engine result pages, like Google

Localism thus becomes a powerful resource for real estate professionals because it allows them to leverage their very local knowledge of a given area to potential clients that otherwise wouldn't know about unless they visited the area personally with a seasoned guide in tow. 

The long overdue feature of making Localism open for consumer and local merchant contribution is scheduled on our internal project board for completion in the next 30 days.  Relative content from local neighbors and businesses coupled with real estate professionals knowledge and expertise will benefit all participants, providing an engaging and comprehensive experience.  I'm confident that the sponsoring professional will reap the substantial rewards Localism was meant to provide from conception.

(Localism sponsorships are less than $10/mo per sponsorship.  Price breaks are available with multiple sponsorships)

6. Listing Router: Leads are dead; 2009 is all about the "click".

Early in the decade well-funded companies utilized marketing budgets and technology that was largely out of reach to individual real estate professionals to generate huge quantities of 'leads' at a much lower cost than an individual was able to.  Many real estate professionals felt that they got burned by these lead generation companies as a result of excessive long term contracts and poor conversion rates.  As a result the concept of buying a lead conjures up a foul taste for most practitioners in the industry. 

Today, many of these lead capture technologies have become cost effective and subsequently made their way into the hands of individual practitioners.  As these points have crossed, a fast growing alternative to 'lead reselling' has manifested called click marketing.  Our entrance into this field is a product we call Listing Router.  Foundationally Listing Router is very simple: ActiveRain members can buy clicks from ActiveRain consumer traffic and route them to specific locations (web-pages) of their choice.  We've taken a novel approaches with Listing Router by sharing a portion of the click revenue with the member who's post and content drove the traffic.

In the future we hope to become the central market place where real estate professionals buy clicks, and Search Engine Marketers sell clicks.  To set up your Listing Router account click here.

(Clicks range in price from $.89 to $3.89 per click.  AR members with high point total are automatically given discounts on the per click price.)

Bonus: Spellcheck: This has been the cause of almost as much headache to ActiveRain members as has been the dreaded Proxy Errors. In the future we plan to add the words: blog, Localism, Raindex, and ActiveRain, to our dictionary.  It irritates us as well.  For some reason this is not an easy technical fix.

The real estate brokerages website traffic represented in this chart that are not dropping off a cliff are all of the online, "non-traditional" variety.

Little tiny 100 person company Redfin is about to surpass Coldwell Banker?  Zip Realty has almost as much traffic as the next three largest brokerages combined?  What does this mean on the local level? What are the big brokerages doing to correct this?

They must recognize this is a serious problem and innaction is not an option.

(Note: Please don't talk about what you charge for commissions or what should be charged on ActiveRain. Price fixing is illegal, M'kay?)

It is a great deficit to start with. Being smart, or God forbid "extremely talented", has to be one of the single greatest impediments to becoming successful in real estate.

No, it's not that real estate is a special field; there are in fact only a few highly specialized fields where brains end up doing more good than harm. For example, it is good if you want to be a rocket scientist, university professor, doctor, or consultant. In pretty much any other field it just gets in the way. Here's why:

1. Smart people use their brains to make the right decision:

People with massive brain power usually know that they are smart so when it comes time to make a decision on something, they tap into their giftings to evaluate and deliberate what the right course of action should be.  Sometimes this process can take days or even weeks.  The really, really smart people usually take the longest to figure out which way to go, sometimes even months. 

Its true that smart people usually don't make a lot of mistakes. They rarely lose a lot of money on a stupid marketing investment, or expend a lot of energy running down the wrong path. In fact they rarely run anywhere; instead they move cautiously.

The dumb people just move.  They don't know no better. They know that even if they took the time to try to figure out the right way to go they'd probably just screw it up anyways, so they just save the time and simply go. The nice thing about just going is that you can do it at any time. All you need to do is get out of your own way.  

2. Smart people rely on their brains to limit the amount of work they need to do:

When you are smart you can usually a figure out a way to do whatever needs to be done more efficiently than dumb people. In fact really smart people usually can figure out a way to get somebody else to do the work for them. When the smart person succeeds at getting someone else to do their work for them, they usually benefit in the short run but not in the long run. By offloading their work, they lose the experience, and confidence that an accomplishment would have built.

Dumb people don't realize that there is any other way to doing something than to just do it.  So they do.

3. Smart people fear looking dumb:

People put a lot of expectations on smart people. If a smart person does something dumb they will usually get chastised, so they learn early on to not screw up.  Dumb people don't have that same pressure.  They are free to mess up as much as it takes to figure something out.  This freedom to screw up is key to learning and succeeding.  Just look at children and compare them to a smart adult in how quickly they can learn something new.  Children, like the dumb person, give themselves the freedom to fail.

4. Smart people count on good ideas to become successful:

Smart people think. They think, then they sometimes come upon a good idea. Smart people know that good ideas are not that easy to come by so they carefully guard that idea to make sure no one steals it.  Dumb people know that they are not going to come up with a good idea so they don't even try.  Instead dumb people spend their time doing.

Closing message to dumb people: The good news is that being dumb comes naturally to you.  There isn't a lot of advice that you need; just keep on going.

Closing message to the gifted ones: Just because you were born with brains does not mean that you cannot be successful; you will just have to work harder than others. When your first reaction is to deliberate the merits of your choices: don't. Learn to go with your gut.  Over time you will be able to develop your gut instinct into a finely tuned insturment.  Know that your smarts will not make you successful. The most important thing to success is giving a little more than everyone else.  The dumb guy knows this inherently; he knows that for him to get even the littlest bit of success he will need to work 2x as hard as the next guy. If this post struck a cord with you and you are thinking that you are going to act more and think less, start now. Seriously, pick up the phone, knock on some doors, do something and don't stop doing it.

I just stumbled upon the comment above that was a part of a post where people were debating the returns on various online real estate websites.  I have heard the sentiments of the comment above numerous times since founding ActiveRain. Because of the rich professional-to-professional networking that happens everyday on ActiveRain some people dismiss the great consumer reach of the site.  This is likely our fault as we tend not to toot our own horn regarding our accomplishments. As a result we have done a poor job educating the industry as to the power inherent in ActiveRain to connect real estate professionals with consumers.

I track our traffic numbers on a daily basis. It's a borderline obsession for me. When you've built websites your whole adult life, this tends to happen. For example, I know that yesterday was our second highest number of visitors ever to the site. 88% of our visitors on a monthly basis come from search engines or referral from other sites. These are potential clients doing search queries that are leading them to your posts.

But the stat that jumps out at me that lets me know ActiveRain is MUCH MORE than 'primarily a peer-to-peer platform' is this: the number of members on our site is quite a bit less than 10% of our unique visitors per month. That means there are over 9 consumers hitting the site for every one member.........and when you factor in how many of our members are actually contributing content, that number gets even higher.

As I was getting ready to write this post, I did some additional research and found the graph below that compares ActiveRain's traffic with other "big boys" of our industry: ColdwellBanker.com, REMAX.com, Century21.com, and KW.com.  It is exciting for me to note that we started off one year ago in 5th place (out of 5) in this group and now we are ranking in 2nd place with almost a 200% yearly growth rate.