The Official ActiveRain Guide

This is one of the most frequently asked questions on our blog. I receive a lot of  emails asking me how I got the buttons on our blog.
This is a simple process. You will be able to follow the steps quite easily.

You first have to create the button. After you create your button you need to add the URL link to where you want the button to take your visitor should they click on a particular button. You add the URL through your Active Rain editor.

There are a lot of Free button creation websites all over the Internet. This is the one that I like because it is easy and has very few steps. Most of the free button making websites I have checked out all want you to add a link back to them in return.

Go to any free button site. This is an example of one of the sites. 

Choose the button size, shape and color here.

 
Enter the text as directed. The instructions are simple to follow. 

Click on get the code.

You then are going to copy and paste this code in your html editor on Active Rain.

When you are in Active Rain editor, click on the html tab. Once in this editor, scroll down to where you are going to want your button to appear. Here you will paste the code.

Then click on publish to draft to make sure it all works. After you have posted to draft go back into the WYSIWYG editor and click on the button. Then click on the link tab at the top of the editor and enter the URL that you want the button to take your visitor to. Once you are happy with the placement you can publish to public and you are done!

Here is the button site for the Twitter follow birdies. You can make your "follow me on Twitter " button here and follow the same copy and paste procedure above.

Once you have the buttons published on one of your posts you can copy and paste the entire button from post to post. You can also store your buttons on an unpublished page on your website.

You can also place your buttons in this same manner on your Active Rain profile.

I hope you found this tutorial helpful.

I wrote a post about how to best use the link of your first and last name for Active Rain, how to make it an part of your overall SEO strategy and how to grab attention with it. Remember to go back and read it if you have not optimized your first and last name fields on your profile in Active Rain.

The next post in this series of articles to help you make the most of your Active Rain blog was the post about how to best use the other contact information and description section of your profile area on Active Rain. So if you are following along you should have made all the necessary changes and additions by now.

This article is going to address the body of your profile page. These are the sections that are listed right below your blog description.

There are three sections here. You can rename each of these sections. I highly recommend you to change these to some of your keywords and make them appealing to your audience.

I read a lot of profiles and most of them can be more fully optimized and more engaging. While you need to have a part of your profile be about you, more importantly this is a chance for you to reach out and pull your audience in. They will not get pulled in if your profile is only about your company. Having too much about your company on your profile also wastes valuable Google juice because Google absolutely loves the Active Rain  profiles. 

You want to make sure you use every chance to use your SEO.

Click on the field that says "rename section".  This is where you should put your main keywords. You will see that I have our main key words as the name of this section yet it is not a turn off to the prospect looking at our profile because it makes sense. You want it to make sense.

Under the first caption what you will see here is all our buttons for search for homes, a link right to our short sale series and other links. After that is a little story of the markets we service with our longer tailed keywords in the body of that paragraph.

Below that we post our bios. Since there are two of us, to make it not look too long, we decided to go with the 2 column look. Nestor on the left side and Katerina on the right side. The bios are written in third person. The reason that is important is that it adds more credibility. If someone else endorses you it carries more weight than if you endorse yourself. This is a skill you learn in marketing. Just like with press releases, I always write our press releases as if someone else is writing about us.

We titled the next section with a higher demand keyword but that encompasses more than just our town of Wellington. Since Wellington is very small of course we list and sell properties outside of our town in neighboring villages and towns so this section is about what comprises our county. You will see again that there are many keywords being used in this paragraph.

Then the last section that is available on your Active Rain profile page we named: What Happy Wellington Homeowners Are Saying About Us. Again, contains keywords but does not take away from the attention grabbing headline. People love to know what others are talking about and doing. That is why Reality TV is so popular. Saying Testimonials is very bland and overused. This title is much more engaging. This is where we put our testimonials from some of our sellers that we closed short sales with and some regular testimonials also.

Make sure that you go to your profile and complete all three of these sections. There is also a difference in what a buyers' agent is going to write and add to their profile than listing agents. We are listing agents so we are attracting to us the sellers by the material we present on our profile. Sellers want to interview us and this is our interview. On the other hand a buyers' agent is going to need more information about the area like on Cyndee Haydon's profile. If you are a buyers' agent create something similar to Cyndee's profile. The videos in her profile are especially compelling and she has a lot of business just from her profile.

The most important thing to remember with working on your Active Rain profile is that it is being read! Our Active Rain profile has had more than 35,729  views.

So get creative with your copy writing and make sure you add links to your outside blog  and add keywords throughout your profile. By all means add video and audio. I am working on that this year. Come back in a year and you will see even more changes to our Active Rain profile. 

Your Active Rain Profile Page- Make It Shine For You!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

By TwitterButton

You just joined Active Rain after reading some posts and now you are ready to jump in and start participating in the Active Rain Community.

So you spend time doing research on a post to write, you spend 2 hours writing your first post on your blog, you hit the publish button with sweaty palms nervous about that very first time!

Then you sit there at your computer refreshing your home page to see if you get any comments.

Alas! No one comes! Your post becomes lonely and you wonder why no one appreciated all your hard work, doesn't anyone appreciate what you just went through?

So the question becomes;

What should you do first?

Comment on other member blogs or write more content?

It is like the age old question: what came first the chicken of the egg?

The very first thing to do is set emotions aside and do not take the response personal if you are writing valuable and good content.

The next thing that is very important to remember is that if you are writing content for your local market like market reports, information on the parks in your market, news from your community- those posts are just not going to yield a lot of comments, if any from members on Active Rain. But that should not deter you from writing this local content because the consumers, the sellers and the buyers in your market and from around the world will begin to read your blog eventually.
The consumers very rarely comment on the blogs that they are reading.

• The best way to gauge whether people are reading your blog is to go to your Active Rain statistics page and see your views for different posts.

• I also love to use mybloglog tracking because it gives me great ideas of what to write about based on the clicks and views that I can track there precisely down to the very words they used to find my blog.

• Another cool tool is to use the Clustrmaps to visually see all the people reading your blog from around the world.

Sidebar: We use this as a listing tool and it is very impressive!

Now of course if you are using Active Rain to just post your listings and write ads then don't expect any response from members or consumers.
You are NOT going to be getting any referrals if you use Active Rain and as a Dump Site for your listings.

You make friends who come to your blog and comment by commenting on other their blogs; meaningful comments that add value.
You keep those friends by writing articles that add value to the community, individuals and groups on your blog.

So the answer is that you must do both simultaneously.

What I do is that I comment on blogs in between phone calls, waiting for water to boil, in between activities to get at least 10 comments in per day.
Now when I first started blogging on Active Rain I made 30 to 50 comments most days and I made some of my best friends ever by just doing this.
I have friends that I can call on any time any day to come to my aid and I can depend on them to handle any referral I send their way!

Then since I am a night owl after everything is quiet in my home, my son cuddles up to me and I write the content for my blog.
I write 10 posts per week; 5 for Real Estate, Localism and Community information and 5 for my coaching business, helping the agents here to blog better, work smarter and follow their dreams to become all that they can be. I add a good amount of personal posts for transparency and building the relationship with the consumer and agent.


Do what is comfortable for you. Most of all have fun and enjoy the journey!

What Comes First? The Comment or the Blog Post? by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

By TwitterButtons.com

Active Rain It Is All In Your Name

Your Active Rain Profile First and Last name are the most important names and words on your profile page and on your Active Rain Blog.

You want to make sure you choose your first and last name correctly on your profile page for 2 reasons.

I can not stress enough like in this post that I wrote about keyword research; you need to do your research to know which words people are searching for on the search engines. Do NOT assume that people are searching for 'your town, USA'.

Go to your home page and click on my profile and then edit on the left side of the page. The settings link on the left is to add your scripts and widget codes.



In order to get the most out of your first and last name on your profile page, you can use more than one word for each your first and last names. You do not need to put your company name within your first and last name because you have a separate field for your company name and that will automatically be a part of your link when you comment on other posts.



We chose to use our real first and last names with the notice that we are Realtors; Nestor and Katerina Gasset Realtors®.
All those words were put in our first name field.

In our last name field we put our main key words: Wellington Florida Luxury Homes.
So now our name reads: Nestor and Katerina Gasset Realtors® Wellington Florida Luxury Homes.



Make sure that you are not putting commas in between your keywords, you can use hyphens.

You can go back and change your first and last name fields easily so if they are not the way you want them. Follow this tutorial to make them more compelling and keyword rich!

Katerina Gasset, CIPS, Realtor ®, Business and Life Coach, Speaker and Author. Reach Katerina at: 561-753-0135

Disclaimer:The information provided herein is supplied by several sources and is subject to change without notice. Wellington Homes Blog does not guarantee or is any way responsible for its accuracy, and provides said information without warranties of any kind, either express or implied. Entries on Wellington Homes Blog represent the opinions and ideas of the author(s). Wellington Homes Blog does not express the views of International Properties and Investments, Inc or those of the broker.

Copyright © 2008 By Katerina Gasset, All Rights Reserved.*Active Rain- It's All In Your Name!* Contact Katerina Gasset for Customized Business and Personal Coaching