The Official ActiveRain Guide

Catch up here: What's In Your Marketing Tool Box? Part 1

I am going to start this series off with the Active Rain Tool Box. My Top 10 favorite tools to maximize Active Rain blogging.

The following tools are in our Active Rain tool box and should be in yours also:

Active Rain Rainmaker Blog:

The most effective $29 per month you will ever spend. If you are still on the fence on whether you should spend 29 bucks a month: equivalent to a few Starbucks each month or the price of a low cost dinner out- you just can not beat this deal. You will get many times more than this back in closed sales. Click here if you are not a member of Active Rain to give it a try .  There is no obligation.

Click here if you are a member of Active Rain and you want to upgrade to be a Rainmaker. 

How much do you spend each month on marketing to get listings or buyers? If you don't have the money- take it from something else you are spending marketing dollars on. If you are not spending any money on marketing- I will be very harsh here- then running a real estate business may not be the right fit for you.

Active Blog

Start your Active Blog now. If you are still waiting around to take advantage of building an outside blog with the power of Active Rain google juice backing you up- don't wait another minute. Before you close out of AR tonight- get your Activeblog up and running.

It is simple and easy. All you have to do is add some widgets, a title, choose a domain, choose a theme and you are off and running. Why go through hours learning wordpress when you can have Active Blog with a couple of mouse clicks!
When google pulls up your keywords- your Active Rain blog will show up but also your Active Blog will also. I try to dominate page one on google. This gives me two more spaces on page one. Google only gives 2 spaces for the same content per author.

Localism Sponsor

Don't miss out on Localism. This is a powerful part of Active Rain that you need to be a part of and a contributor too. We sponsor our area and it has been very profitable to do so.

Hit Router

Hit Router will not work very well without a good IDX product or some way to get your visitors to do their home search on your site or blog. It is run like pay per click. Hit Router needs a post by itself to explain all the benefits. Make sure it is set up on your blog for sure. Here is a link to more information about Hit Router.

Firefox Browser

Use Firefox for your best Active Rain browsing experience. Active Rain works best with Firefox. It is also the safest browser. Use IE for mls and Firefox for everything else. Firefox will be listed in time management tools where I will show you some time saving applications.

Real Bird

Add Real Bird as listing widgets to your Active Rain sidebar.
Add Real Bird as a search widget right on your Active Rain blog and on Localism neighborhood posts. The last 3 contracts that our buyers agent wrote and is closing on (one already closed) are from Real Bird widget searches on our Active Rain blog! Together Active Rain and Real Bird bring you powerful buyers that are leaving their phone numbers and ready to buy. We have discovered that 100% of our Real Bird prospects are ready to buy right now to within 30 to 60 days. This is way above our website prospect time frames. Click here to check out Real Bird.

I am an affiliate of Real Bird because I love the product so much. If you click here for Real Bird I will get credit for you. Real Bird is free and they have added features for small fees.

Iclip Clip Art and Photos

The best clip art to add to your blog that is safe to use for Real Estate blogs. If you are using free or paid clip art make sure you read their terms of service also known as TOS. Most of them including Microsoft say you can only use their clip art for personal use, school and community use but NOT commercial or business use. Here is one of the posts that I wrote about Iclipart.

Of course the best images are those you take yourself with your own camera but there are a lot of post topics that a photo just won't gel with. Iclipart has over 7 Million images that you can download on your computer in many different sizes so you don't have to resize. You can get Iclipart for only $34.95 for one year! I am an affiliate of Iclipart. Click here to get the best clip art available.


Snagit

A lot of Active Rain members ask me how do I get the cool edges on my tutorial screen shots. I absolutely love Snagit which also deserves its' own tutorial. This is software for your computer and it only costs about $49. ONE TIME FEE.No renewals, no annual fee, no monthly fee. They also offer you a FREE 30 day trial!  I get nothing to promote Snag-It. There is SO much more that you can use Snagit like arrows, borders of all kinds and colors, blurbs, add in text, cut out text, etc. I can not even list all the features of this product to jazz up your Active Rain blog and save time. Here is the tutorial I wrote about Snagit back in Feb. 2008. You can see some of the applications- but like I wrote- it does not even scratch the surface of what this amazing product can do.

Real Estate Shows

I was going to add this one to the marketing section, however, no Active Rain blog is complete without Real Estate Shows. I wrote a post about using Real Estate Shows here.
 

Flickr and Picnic

Adding your photos to Flickr you get the added benefit of more exposure for your blog. You also get the benefit of using Picnic where you can do all kinds of editing to your photos for Free from serious frames to funny faces.

Kompozer and ScribeFire 

Last but not least, Kompozer is my favorite blog editing tool to have in our tool bar arsenal. I wrote a post here about Kompozer so I won't go into detail here. But if you want to add color, highlights, fonts, text sizes and a lot more, choose Kompozer. Download Kompozer to your computer for Free. It is open source. Kompozer works like a breeze on Firefox because it is developed by Mozilla, the same company that developed Firefox.

Scribefire is an add on for Firefox. To get those cool colors in comments use ScribeFire as your blog editor. You can write your whole posts in ScribeFire too which I sometimes do but then you have to add link tags and image tags in the Active Rain editor. It also does not have the highlighting effect that Kompozer has, or maybe I am just not able to find it.


I will do another post in this series on tools to add to your Active Rain side bar and some do's and don't about those tools.

So there are my top 10 favorite tools to use on our Active Rain blog.

List yours in the comment section! See you next time for part 3 where we will discuss online time management tools.
 

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What's In Your Active Rain Tool Box? Part 2 by Coach Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

By TwitterButton

 

Sometimes I read comments from Active Rain members who wish they knew how to get more comments on their posts.

Before I found Active Rain I was on Blogger. It was very lonely there. I had one comment during that time and I felt like I was in some deep dark cave and no one was ever going to find me!  But I also knew that Google analytics would tell me if anyone was even reading and they were.

Writing for your local markets and posting your articles about your area to Localism is a great way to build upon your consumer readership. Localism posts don't garner a ton of Active Rain member comments. But that does not matter if you have readers who are reading your blog.

One time I read a post written by an Active Rain member who titled her post something like, Why is no one commenting on my blog? Just because no one comments does not mean that no one is reading. There is a big difference. Now if you don't have anyone reading your blog- well, that is a problem. You will have to figure out why no one is reading. But let's assume for the sake of this post that is not the case.

There are many more people reading your blog than are commenting on your blog. Typically I read many more blogs here on Active Rain and outside of Active Rain than I ever would have time to comment on. I try to make about 20 comments per day. Sometimes I can only get my 10 comments in on very busy days and often on Sundays I make no comments.

So I told this member to go and look at her statistics to see how many people came to each particular post she had written.

While we all love to have recognition and comments from fellow Active Rain members and that is great to build a referral business in this manner we must remember that the public, the consumers, the readers outside of Active Rain very rarely comment on any blog. So while you may feel lost in this community called Active Rain you may well be surprised to find out how many people are actually visiting your blog and profile.

How do you find this out?

On the left side towards the bottom of your home page on Active Rain you will see a set up links that looks like this:

 

Click on the link that is called, 'STATISTICS'. What a wealth of information you will find on your statistics page.

At the top of your Statistics page you can see how many times your profile has been visited. That is the page on your Active Rain blog that you place information on about your services, your experience, links to home searches, market information, email, phone number, etc.

Underneath that you will see two tabs. One of those tabs is Subscribers. This is where you can see who has subscribed to your blog.

There is the Blog Entries tab. At this tab you can see the title of your post, how many comments you received on that post, how many views of that post and how many click throughs on that post.

What I would like to call your attention to is that the posts with very few comments are my posts to Localism and our outside Activeblog. But the amazing thing is that these same posts have a huge draw to them by the readers that will never leave a comment. These are for my posts about short sales. There usually are over 1000 views on my posts about short sale information and help and only a few comments. Most of the click throughs are to our website since I do not link out to many outside sources. You can see the one below that has only 8 comments but 1527 views and 176 click throughs.  We also just got another short sale listing over the phone from a person who found our Active Rain blog and clicked through to our Short Sale information page on our website.

The best way to build a large readership of those who comment and those who don't is to provide value. Pay it forward attitudes really create a great energy around your blog that will attract others to you. Don't just post your listings. People can go a million places online to see listings. Don't just post to Members only. Actually, I can probably count on one hand how many members only posts I have written. You do not get the Google Juice that you are here to get by writing members only posts.

And if you want comments from members on Active Rain then go out and make comments first on their blogs. This is the fastest and best way to get comments.

 

        

Your Blog May Not Be As Lonely As You Think! No Comments? by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

Do you want to add color to your text in your posts?

Do you want to change the font size?

Do you want to add some highlights to grab more attention to your blog?

Here is a list of online editors that you can type in WYSIWYG- and then with one click have it all turned into html for you without you having to know any html code.  I have used all of these editors.

This is a review of the pros and cons of each of these online editors. This way you can choose which one or more that you want to use in your blogging.

When someone asks me which one do I use, I say:  IT ALL DEPENDS ON  MY MOOD! It also depends on what it is I want to accomplish and how.

My favorite online html editor now Kompozer. It is no longer called Nvu. It is now called Kompozer. Just click on the link to download Kompozer. Nvu and Kompozer are open source. I have Nvu on my laptop and Kompozer on my desk top. I use them both. These are free online editors that you can download right on to your computer's hard drive. It is a program that you can use off line.  There are times when I like to write offline especially living in Florida. We get power outages and daily storms. So when I want to write I do not have to be on the internet in order to draft my posts for my blog.

The features I like best in Nvu: ( Kompozer)

• Offline editor

• Save draft posts to external hardrive for copyright reasons ( among other reasons)

• Work on several posts at one time and move easily file to file

• The developers are always improving the product

• I like to save most of my posts on my external hard drive to gather data for writing books later on.

• Contains a CSS editor

• Powered by Mozilla

• Just like in Firefox, you can have one screen open and edit several documents at once.
  

• Move between Htmls and WYSIWYG easily. ( Wish AR had that feature:)

• You can customize all sorts of things with Kompozer if you do happen to know html. When you add an image, you can change your code right underneath the photo in a box that shows up with the source code. It is really neat!
  

The drawbacks to Nvu:

• You have to remember to delete the first 3 lines or so of html code in draft mode on the Active Rain editor.

• To add images in Nvu, you have to have a URL for the image. That means that you will have to upload your photos to Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa Web which adds an extra step.

•  BUT this is NOT the case with Kompozer! With Kompozer- you can do all sorts of cool things with your images. You can load them from your computer's hard drive, you can add alt 1 image tags and you can embed links right into your images.
  

To avoid this step you can grab the source code, ( html code) from Nvu, paste it in Active Rain html editor, then publish to draft. Then go back in under WYSIWYG editor in Active Rain and add your images from your computer the ordinary way.


The next online editor that I use quite a bit is the new  Box. net Web Builder Page. I really like this online editor. You have to be online to use this editor.  I like to use Box.net for posts that take up a  lot of space such as my tutorials because the files are stored in your Box.net account. I wrote a post on how to write a post using the Web Page builder here.

The features I like best in Box.net Web Builder Page:

• Online editor

• Online storage area

• You can share the files and others can add to your post before you publish. Great for team articles.

• You can access your files from anywhere and from any computer.

• You can add images from your computer without the extra step of uploading them to Photobucket, etc.

• It has an auto save feature so if you forget to click save often; it does it by default for you.

The drawbacks to Box.net:

• Some people have said the source code does not convert correctly in Active Rain html editor. I have not ever had a problem with converting.

• You can not add alt 1 image tags in Box.net. I have put in a suggest request to their developers to add this feature.

• You can not add link titles to your links. To deal with this, just add your links after you post to draft in Active Rain editor.

When I use Box.net- I use it for the font sizing, colors and highlighting. I then add the images and links in the Active Rain WYSIWYG editor.

A very fast and easy online editor is Online-html-editor.de. This is an open source product from Germany. When you go into this program you need to click on the English tab in order to use the editor in English. Of course, if you speak German and want to publish in Germany then go for it the way it is.

The features I like best about Online-html- editor.de :

• Online editor

• Fast and Easy

• The code seems to have no issues moving over to the Active Rain html editor. 

• I use this editor when I want to post something very fast such as the Thank You for Happy Birthday that I don't care about saving.

• The image feature is great. It has really good alt 1 image tag feature but you have to grab the URL so you do need to upload your images to Photobucket, Flickr or Picasa Web.

• This editor has a simple and good link title tag feature. 

The drawbacks to this editor:

• I don't like how you can not save the draft unless you save it as online as an html file on a web page.

• There are too many steps in order to save files.

• It does not have an auto save feature.

• I can not use this editor if I am doing a longer post that I need to come back to later.

• You can not upload images from your computer so there is an added step.

I use all of these editors like I said depending on what it is I want to accomplish.
You can try them each out and see which one you like best or you can use them all. My favorite one is the new Kompozer! It wins on every front.

Have some fun adding some color, highlighting, font sizes and other features these html editors offer without spending hundreds of dollars on fancy programs that you have to learn. These programs have the same features that Microsoft Front Page, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs have.

You don't have to learn html to use these editors. You just write in English just as you want to see it when it is published.
Then just click on 'source' which turns all your work into html code with a click of a button.
Then copy and paste that source code into the Active Rain Editor under the html editor tab.

One of the biggest tips I can give you about this is to make sure that you post to draft first, then check to make sure you like what you see in the Active Rain draft mode before you publish your post.

The learning curve on all of these is very fast and painless.

 

        

How To Jazz Up Your Blogging- Free and Easy!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

 

As we are going through your Active Rain blog structure we have covered the following tutorials;

Active Rain Tutorial- It's All In Your Name?

Active Rain Tutorial- How to Get Mileage from Your Active Rain Profile

Active Rain Tutorial- Profile Page- Make It Shine For You.

Today we will answer a question that we receive a lot and a few extra goodies and that is: what are all those little symbols at the bottom of your posts after you publish your post to Active Rain?

First let's start with the most frequent question that was asked in the previous tutorials:

How Do You Bookmark A Post That You Like On Active Rain?

At the bottom of any post that you read there are these 4 little symbols or buttons.
 There is one here that you click to bookmark the post. Once you click on BOOKMARK the color will change to red.

Now after you bookmark the post how do you find your bookmarks?

You go over here to your home page, scroll down on the left side you will see a list of links and one of those links will say, Blog Bookmarks.
Click on this link and up will come all of your bookmarked posts. The problem with these bookmarks is that there is no way to organize them which is of course on the wish list given to the techie gurus at Active Rain to come up with some way to organize your bookmarks. They are organized by the last comment made on that particular bookmarked post.

There are some other ways to bookmark and organize your favorite posts but we will learn that on a different tutorial. This is an Active Rain tutorial.

There are some other really nifty little tools next to the bookmark button. You can email a post to others by using the email feature of your favorite posts, this is a great way to make some of your favorite bloggers go viral. Please keep in mind that you can email 'members only' posts. Just the public posts.

The other button is the the Flag button. This is the best feature that Active Rain has in this section. When you  fit the flag button you get several options. If you think a post is feature worthy, you know, to earn the coveted gold star then you  just click the flag button and then check off the box that says FEATURE!  Please bear in mind that whenever you use the flagging feature Active Rain Corp knows who you are. SO if you LOVE to feature yourself, they will be able to tell that it is you and not someone else!

 

You also can flag the spammer and plagiarized content here. If you see those famous copy and pastes simply flag it for plagiarism and add the URL of the website the content was copied from. Then the post will get the dreaded yellow X .

 

I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial, the next Active Rain tutorial will be about all the choices of where to post your Active Rain post to.

 

 

        

Active Rain Tutorial- Bookmarking and more!  by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.