I wrote an Active Rain Tutorial on how you should be using your first and last name fields for SEO strength. You can read the SEO in your name post by clicking here. I suggest that you take care of your first and last name before you move on to this post on optimizing your Active Rain Profile.
When you are on your MY HOME page you will see a link on the left sidebar under the new blog links that says MY PROFILE ( EDIT).
Click the EDIT link and it will take you to your profile area. Here is where you make your changes and add content to your profile page.
If you don't like to see a lot of email in your inbox or have a hard time organizing all your emails I would suggest that you get a free gmail account to use for your Active Rain home page or just use a new email box within your Outlook.
Next, add your website addresss that you want consumers to go to.
We will go over more about choosing URLs, website addresses in my SEO To The Top Webinar.
I just noticed that I have not changed our URL since joining. We have a great keyword rich URL that we now own. I am going to go in to change that URL now.
After the phone numbers there is one line that has the EDIT ADDRESS link right next to it. Click this link and put in a complete snail mail address or a postal box complete with city, state and zip code. Please make sure it is an address that mail will get to you. If you work for a brand name company then you need to add that name to the address in line 1 because your mail will not get to you with just your name on it in most cases. I know because we send out letters of appreciation to our subscribers each Christmas and I am getting a lot of return to sender mail. When you move, please go back in here and change your address so it is updated. We have over 1100 subscribers but only 600 had addresses to mail our letter out to. Out of the 600 we sent out we are still getting letters back marked as undeliverable.
The next section is your Description section. In here you will add a description about your area and what is in it for the consumer. Make sure to add your keywords in this section in a nice flowing style that does not appear like you are trying to just get your keywords found by Google. You know the look! Stay away from looking like that.
There is a 200 character limit in the Description so choose your words wisely.
On the right side of your profile page you will see a PRIMARY MARKET box. Here you will add your state and county. When you get ready to choose your town or city you want to make sure that people are actually looking for your town or city. Just because you live in your town and love your town does not mean that others love your town as much as you do.
We will cover more about this SEO Tips in our SEO To The Top Webinar.
Make sure you upload your photo here too. No one wants to develop a relationship with those who do not show their face! I want to know who I am networking with and consumers want to know the same also.
Then click on SAVE PROFILE.
Save your work often. It is such a bummer to not have saved your work only to be kicked out of the system and having to start all over again. You can go back and change things as you learn to get better at what you should be writing about and what words to use on your profile page.
We will continue this topic in another post so stay tuned. We will cover writing the 3 sections underneath the profile section we just covered.
Follow me on Twitter at Twitter.com/CoachKaterina.
Active Rain Profiles- How To Get Mileage From Your Active Rain Profiles by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Nestor Gasset and Katerina Gasset- Realtors®, CIPS, ABR, SFR, GRI, REOS
As always, your tutorials are so helpful! I know I don't say it often, but I am grateful for all the time that you take to help us.
This is great information and well needed when I look around at profiles in Active rain. Some profiles are way overdue an revamp.
Totally awesome information. I've book marked this post so I can come back and review them again after trying out some of your recommended updates/changes. Thanks!
Thanks for your time and effort..great post!!I'll need to come back and review..always can review our profile and update. Good sound advice.
Google loves ActiveRain Profiles.
Nuff said.
Excellent overview for new ActiveRainers to understand the power of playing in the Rain.
Thanks for the good tips
Katerina,
You did a great job of explaining----it will be especially helpful to new members at AR.
Katerina thanks for the lesson. I don't think that I have looked at mine since I joined.
Nestor and Katerina - I would love it if you would send some posts like this over to the group "Team RERockstar." My idea was to create a group for the people I had invited and have my network of contacts on ActiveRain dive in and help some new bloggers get their feet wet.
Thanks Guys,
A gentle reminder is always cool. As I followed along I discovered a couple of updates made to the AR profile and made those changes.
Best to you and thank you so much for the card. It was a very nice thing to receive.
Thanks for the reminder. I had done all the changes however my office is moving next week and I will need to change the address.
Good Morning Katerina! Thanks for the rweminder to change up the description. Mine just has keywords in it. I need to work on that personal assistant ad too!
Hi Nestor and Katerina, Thanks for the great reminder to be sure that we are utilizing our Active Rain profiles to their fullest. Invaluable info! And have a wonderful weekend!
Thanks Katerina, you reminded me about checking my profile time to time...and I updated a couple of things...Happy New Year to both of you - Bo
Great information as always! Happy New Year!
Great job on the information on boosting the profile. I will triple check mine to see that it is working at it's best.
Thanks again for taking the time to share this information - I will be checking to make sure I have all these -
I enjoy reading these little tricks of the trade. We have spend a lot of time updating our profiles and making them visually appealing, SEO friendly, and content rich
Katerina, kudos to you all the time, in developing these tutorials for everyone. This one on profile setup is EXCELLENT!!
Thanks Katerina, I have tweaked it again!
Debbie
Good review. Should be helpful for those that want to add a few extra words in the name fiield etc.
Thanks Katerina. I reviewed mine right away and made some changes.
I know I really need to go in and update my profile. It is way overdue but I never can seem to find the time.
Thank you. I have reviewed my profile information and have made changes.
Thanks so much!
Cindy
Very useful resource! ;)
Katerina, as always so simple and so helpful!
Thanks, Katerina - I am looking forward to the post on the 3 sections.
Katernina: As always so easy to understand and so helpful to those of us who are less versed in SEO and the ways of the web. I have put something on my vision board (that you suggested) to be sure this gets done.
Everyone! Thank you all for your wonderful and delightfully pleasing comments, they make me feel warm and fuzzy, seriously! THANKS!
I like to take things that look complicated and break them down into steps all of us non tech types can understand. Step by step!
I look forward to writing more tutorials for all of you.
Feel free to join my Active Rain Question of the Week group and post your questions there. Katerina
Thank you, being new to active rain this is some good info, I look forward to the next lesson thanks zane
Katerina - you are so good as tutorials, no matter what the topic. The posts are easily understand, pleasant to look at, full of information, and the graphics are especially helpful. I suspect there are folks here who are not new who will benefit from your teachings. Thanks for a good read.
Jeff
Jeff- WOW! That was one kind comment that I am going to print out and add to my vision board! I love it, makes me feel like writing some more tutorials!:)
I'm on my hands and knees bowing to you again for a fabulous post, thank you again for your efforts to help us.
Katerina,
As always, you offer a wealth of advice to help with SEO.
Sonny- Get up! I am a coach and an agent paying it forward. Of course I love to be appreciated and praised so I thank you very much!
Great post. This is perfect information for Active Rain newbies.
Our AR profiles are probably one of the most overlooked areas to connect with the search engines and public. Twitter users should have an advantage when writing their Descriptions -- all of that practice with just 140 characters should come in handy when we get 200 to work with here!
Great info and very easy to read....and understand. This will surely be useful to all!
This was great! Thanks so much for the tutorial. I've been lurking on AR for several months now and this finally got me started on posting a profile!
thanks for the easy to understand explanation. I'm off to double check my profile page and make sure I didn't miss anything.
I did not realize much of this. Thanks!
To all of you who stepped in to comment since my last visit- Thank you so much. One of the great benefits of writing a tutorial like this is that I find things I need to improve on and fix too! I see that our website is NestorGasset.com when I now have an SEO rich domain, Wellington-Luxury-Homes.com. Of course Nestorgasset.com still works and that is the one we give to all our clients and those in our town who know us because it is easy to remember and great for branding.
It is s good idea to put on your calendar to review your profile about every 6 months and make the necessary changes and as you learn more about SEO, make those changes as well. Katerina
Katerina: Thank you so very much for this article. I very much appreciate all the information that you blog about.
Katerina, very helpful reminder. I just made a change and check others. Thanks.
Katerina- this is a good reminder to all; just doing this today but for a different reason.
I am trying to ADD a Link Button ON our AR site
From the MyBlogLog site:
AR will not accapt any of the 'buttons' & their 'code';
Any ideas on what it is that I am doing wrong?
Any suggestions on what I MUST do to make this work?
Did try to add this info. as a "Link"--that did not work.
Am out of ideas, and to make it worse, I am not even certain that site will drive or direct traffic to my Blog on AR; willing to add items IF they are beneficial to aiding our Business Site.
Graceful Thanks to you, or to any of your readers who may have successfully done the above.
Barb ( & Sal,too)
good thinking... thanks for the tips.
Barb- Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. Hopefully you got your question answered. You can not add scripts to your ARblog any longer. There are many widgets that are approved since they are not scripts but rather code. SO you will have to check to see if what you are trying to add to your AR settings is a script of a code.
Great Stuff Katrina, thanks!
Thanks for a great tutorial! I'm off to edit my profile right now!
Good stuff folks! Thanks for the info and look forward to reading the others you have written.
Everyone- Just checking back in to read your comments and tell you that I enjoy reading them and I am reading them! Be back in a few!
Thanks again! I have implemented these changes as well.
I would like to follow your posts can you tell me how to do that, thanks again for another gret set of ideas
Mike- Go to the top of my blog, above our photo there is a button that says 'subscribe', click that button and you will be subscribed. My blog will show up on the right side of your page when you click blogs. All the ones you subscribe to will be listed on the right side.
You can also subscribe by email by adding your email address above the email subscribe button further down my right sidebar. Thanks so much in advance for subscribing! Katerina
Great tips to keep my AR fresh!
Thanks so much ---since I am fairly new to AR, I appreciate your tutorial probably more than most.
Thank you! Great post to freshen up our profiles!
Thanks for another great tutorial!
This is a must read for new AR bloggers. As more folks sign on as "Paid" members from now and into the future, I'll be sure to mention it to them!
Thank you! This helps me as I am getting back to my Active Rain account and hoping so much to become a blogger!
Great information I have already mad a couple of changes to my profile.
I just tried to developa footer for my page. It took me most of the day. One of the lessons I learmed at the html is limited. Don't get too fancy!
Thanks for the info..I am on it!
Excellent job. I keep learning more and more from you guys!
Another great tip Nestor and Katerina. I am making the adjustments very soon.
Sometimes my email address at my office gets kicked out as spam, so taking your advice, got a gmail account but the profile will not allow it to be changed!
I am going to take your advice and get a gmail account. I am using yahoo at this time. thanks for all the tips you provided in this post.
Really good to know. I'm glad somebody is sharing this information. I had no idea
That seems pretty straight forward
Katerina,
I am now stalking you on Twitter. I have a long history of Internet Marketing but I am new to AR. I currently manage content for 5 seperate industry blogs. Your trainings are so very well done. I appreciate the time and effort that you take in creating such valuable content. You make it very easy for me to navigate my way through AR! Very impressed!
Ok! now I am on my way! Thanks. Next tutorial please!
I am following your linked blogs to update my profile. Thank you Margaret C.