The Official ActiveRain Guide

I have discovered a couple of items here at Active Rain during my time here, and I thought it might be valuable to share this information with my friends. 

I am probably not the first to write about this, but I only recently figured out that it is possible to invite others to any group in which you are a member.  I guess I have spent a lot of my time in the groups where I am a founder and/or moderator (Family Ties, Active Rain Addicts, and Inspired by Song!).  I have invited countless people to my own groups over the past few months, and I thought that this ability was limited to the groups that you help to run, but this is not the case. 

If you are a member of any group that you think would be of interest to one of your AR friends, simply click on the "Invite a Member" link to tell others about it and to invite them to join as well.  The only thing that you have to know is your friend's profile name (e.g. "jasoncrouch", or "rayandpaul", or "coolestdangagentinthevalley").  In any group that you belong to, you should see this on the left ("Invite Member" is highlighted here):

One other Active Rain feature that I find myself using more and more often is the "Search" link at the top of the page:

After clicking on this, you can search by Profiles, Blogs, Blog Comments, or Groups. 

There are many uses for this terrific feature:

• Have you ever wanted to go back and find a comment that you thought was interesting?  You can use a keyword and the name of the commenter to search the Blog Comments. 
• If you are looking for a specific type of group, this is a great place to begin.
• As a prolific blogger, I have had posts of mine mentioned on occasion in posts by other bloggers.  An easy way to find these posts (and perhaps make a new friend in the process) is to search for my own name under the "Blogs" section.  I was surprised not too long ago to find about 20 articles that mentioned my name for one reason or another.  The more you write, the more likely it is that this will happen to you as well. 

EDITED: This comment from Brad Andersohn was compelling enough that I felt I should include it here:

BTW - another great search tool is the tag word search.  Just type in http://activerain.com/blogs/tags/  (then anything you want to search)  this will only pull up specific posts where those keywords were used.  It's a more refined search, but saves you the time weeding through many blogs to find what you want or need. 

Thanks so much for reading this one!  Let me know if you have any questions. 

Marlene Sheffer sent me an email with the following question:

"OK, I am LOVING listingdomains.com. I think that RES provides a better show, though. I need to know how to do a RES show, and get a website address that is specific to that home, and do it quickly and easily for less than about $40 per listing. I have absolutely NO knowledge of html or code, except to know that I don't know it."

Well, in this day and age, you can register a domain name just about anywhere for less than $10, so the cost will not be an issue. I use Names Direct. Each domain name costs $8.95. But you can find them cheaper if you look hard.

Here's the term you need to know: URL Forwarding.

URL Forwarding is free with every domain registration service. So, that means you can point any domain you register to any other existing web page without any additional cost. All you need to know how to do is copy and paste the URL of the existing page into the right place. So, you will need to find the URL Forwarding edit field at your registrar. Typically you can choose standard forwarding or stealth forwarding. Stealth forwarding will retain your domain name when you land on the page, but the contents of the page will be hidden from the search engines. Standard URL forwarding simply redirects and doesn't hide the existing page's URL. I usually choose standard, since there is little SEO benefit from a single property domain name and the main objective is to make the URL easier to remember.

I'm going to show you how to do this using a Real Estate Shows Flyer. (But this will work with any URL) I registered 1234 Turner Road (http://www.1234turnerroad.com) this morning and forwarded the URL to this flyer page: http://www.realestateshows.com/flyer.php?id=0000001965.

Here's how I did it.

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How Do Your Create Image Links In Your Blog Posts?

This is a commonly asked question, with a very simple answer. You create image links the same way you create text links. Simply select the image, then click on the chain icon in the menu bar. Input the url you wish to link to and you're done.

Here is an image that is not linked.

Here is an image that is linked.

And here is the video that show how I did it.

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