jonwashburn

We've recently tried on a new look for our local pages (state/county/city), and to much of our chagrin it has been received by some in our community with a thumbs down. I'd like to let our community know that we are reading every post written on our network about this change, and following the comment stream intently.

Our members needs are our #1 priority.  Every change we make is always done with the goal to bring value to our community.  In this instance our primary goal was to increase relevancy to these pages and add valuable information to consumers landing on these pages. We also needed to make these changes to prepare the foundation for some exciting changes coming to ActiveRain in the near future.

However with that said, we hear you all loud and clear and now understand that having a points based directory by state is very important!

For everyone who is trying to catch up on this debate, I've included an image of the state page before the change, and after. Please let me know in the comments below which you prefer and why. 

Before:

After:

"I don't feel comfortable about committing to ActiveRain, or any other platform that I don't own. What if ActiveRain gets bought by Google or they change the price or terms?"

First off, thank you Harj Gill for bringing up this issue and addressing it in your own blog post today. I'd like to echo your statements, and add some of my own.

"With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are in the midst of the worst housing recessions in history. The actual job of selling real estate in today's market is extremely difficult. When I sold real estate in the late 90's and early part of this decade I viewed my job as 90% marketing to get the clients, and 10% actually representing my clients. Listings sold themselves, oftentimes just hours after they were put on the market. Buyer clients were in such a frenzy they nearly always bought on the first tour, and getting a deal closed was always a cinch. No money? No credit? No job? No problem! Now it seems that with the complications brought by REO's and short sales, the real work starts after the buyer finds the home they want. 

However, there are silver linings. One of which is the marketing revolution that blogging has brought to the industry. This is a unique time; a gold rush of sorts. A motivated real estate professional can sign up for ActiveRain at noon, write their first blog post by 1pm, and have a top ranked article on Google by 1:15pm. The reach, authority, and power afforded by this medium is immense, and yet, the percentage of RainMakers taking advantage of this opportunity is very small when compared to the number of professionals in the industry.

We know the site works; I'm constantly hearing success stories that blow my mind. ActiveRain has changed lives, and saved careers. 

Yet, we don't know what the future may bring. Today, ActiveRain is Google's golden child, but who knows what will happen tomorrow. Today, ActiveRain costs $39 per month for RainMaker access. Might we change our mind and start charging $199 for the same service tomorrow? Does it matter? 

"If you worry about what might be, and wonder what might have been, you will ignore what is." 

In a few years everything will change in this business, just like everything is different today than it was three years ago. Today ActiveRain represents a golden arrow for you business. Use it up. Squeeze every last drop of success from it that you can. 

I never think of the future. It comes soon enough." ~Albert Einstein

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?

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.

For years I've been a believer that it was best to "Work smart so you don't have to work hard". 

Lenn,

I am sorry to hear that you've been unsuccessful in your endeavors to not have to work hard. Obviously you are extremely successful, but even after all of your success you are still one of the hardest working people I know.  Surely if you were as smart as you are a hard worker, you would be one of the smartest people in the world. Any observant person can see that you are one of the hardest working.

Let's take a look:

1. You are in the top .001% of top point earners on ActiveRain.  In fact you are #1 out of over 100k people.  It takes a lot of work to achieve at that level.

2. You are up bright and early, 6AM, writing a blog post on ActiveRain.  You are an SEO maven and know that blogging on ActiveRain is one element of work that generates SEO results. You would be surprised how few people start work at 6am. I would bet hard cash that you don't clock out at 5pm either.  We're talking 12 hour days and 60 hour weeks.  Definitely hard work.

3. You generate a ton of buyers on your website homefinders.com.  Now a smart person would just sell or refer those leads outright.  But you take the extra work to speak to nearly every prospect and set them up as slam dunks for your referral agents.

4. You registered homefinders.com in 1995 and have doggedly stuck with it for over a decade. I bet the first few years were lean. Lots of hard work investing in the internet when the smart money was on telemarketing.

5. I also understand that you programmed most of your website. I'm guessing that you don't have any formal training as a computer programmer, but you needed it programmed so you just did it.  Doing the dirty work that you should have just outsourced allowed you to learn first hand how to increase your SEO. How's that SEO knowledge working out for you now?

The most successful people in nearly every industry are not so smart.  To rise to the top you need to do things differently than all of the other smart people.  You need to take risks that smart people think are ludicrous. You are a top producer now, but don't forget what it took to get there. You are doing our members a great disservice if you tell them that becoming great is going to be possible without an extra helping of stupid-hard work.

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.

Our network is being plagued by cut and paste content! So today we hired a new team member. Let me introduce you to Harlen 'The Copyright Crusader'.

We are a community of PROFESSIONALS! 99% of you understand that. Harlen has been brought on to ensure that  the 1% who are bringing the rest of us down are dealt with. He has assured us that his relentless pursuit of justice for the holders of copyright protection will be unmatched. He has guaranteed to crush copyright infringement in 30 days or we don't have to pay him (can't beat that). How you might ask? well............

Every time you submit a post on Activerain you see this:

Some of you choose to ignore it. Some of you think that since you have gotten away with it before, you will continue to get away with it. You will not. Today, on his first day on the job, Harlen suspended the accounts of four members who had previously been warned about this type of behavior. One member had over 150,000 points. That's a lot of time wasted copying content and trying to pass it off as your own. Please, Harlen implores you, do not be the next person this happens to. He will be hunting content to the far and wide reaches of the network and running that content in Google to find the original author.

If you see someone copying content, leave a link to this post in their comment section. Warn them about Harlen and his 'Copyright Crusade'. Because if Harlen sees it before it's pulled down, the first offense will be a two week suspension. No questions asked. (Harlen thinks this is really lenient. Read that image above again.......it says "Posting copyrighted material without permission WILL result in being removed from ActiveRain")

The second time will be a ban from the network. Harlen has guaranteed this garbage will STOP!!! Plagiarism is polluting a network that thousands of people have poured their heart and soul in to making stellar. Harlen promises you that plagiarizers will no longer leave their mark on ActiveRain.

We have something very special here at ActiveRain. Your participation here is not a right, it is a privilege. By abusing that priviledge you are making yourself, and more importantly, the rest of ActiveRain look very unprofessional. Our community guidelines say: ActiveRain is a place where real estate professionals can network with their peers and discuss industry insider topics. It is also a public forum where consumers can pull back the curtain and see what the real estate industry is really about.

Do we really want consumers pulling back that curtain and seeing plagiarism, stealing and dishonest gaming? Harlen does not!!! Harlen believes that we all learned about plagiarism in elementary school. He remembers his fifth grade teacher Mrs. Robinson sending him to the principals office when he copied a passage from Marcus Valerius Martial without citing it:

"Why, simpleton, do you mix your verses with mine? What have you to do, foolish man, with writings that convict you of theft? Why do you attempt to associate foxes with lions, and make owls pass for eagles? Though you had one of Ladas's legs, you would not be able, blockhead, to run with the other leg of wood." - Marcus Valerius Martial

Here is a great resource for what you can and can't do: The wise advice of Lenn Harley

(This is not a joke, even though it is kind of funny)

So after an all night-marathon development session we are finally ready and happy to announce ActiveRain's newest addition: Channels & Topics.

For an overview of what Channels and Topics are check out this post by Brad Andersohn: "How to Use ActiveRain Channels"

Although the content being displayed today in most of the Topics and some of the Channels is sparce and even somewhat confusing, we have great plans for what we believe Channels and Topics will grow into over the next few months. More immediately (tomorrow night) we will put live a few extra design finishes on the home, channel, and topic pages to help make it clearer. (We recognize that some of the design elements are not displaying properly and as a result are making it difficult to navigate through the channels and the topics.

Here is a partial list of the changes we've made:

1. Rearranged the layout on the ActiveRain home page. Most notably, we removed all advertising on this page, added Channel and Topic Navigation, and provided greater prominence to the featured articles. (Within the next few days we expect to have posts from people our members subscribed to show up in the list.)

2. We removed the ActiveRain logo from the header area on pages optimized by the ActiveRain Customizer.

3. Featured Members are now displaying on the city level for logged in users.  We play to make it display this way for non-logged in users soon.

Please check out the changes and let us know your opinion on this blog post.  Our company philosophy is to release site upgrades as fast as reasonable and then look to our members for feedback. We do this so that if we are moving in a wrong direction with a product we can learn about our mistakes early and then adjust our direction before wasting unnecessary time and resources.