One of the questions that we get asked most often, is why do you need to have a blog on ActiveRain?
The answer is many fold but I will keep in line with the value for your listing marketing since that is the topic of this website. It helps you to get more Google juice and better placement on the SERPS for your listings.
ActiveRain is a real estate community full of bloggers who are either real estate agents or brokers or in some industry that is real estate focused like staging or mortgage loans.
ActiveRain has been around for many years and has gained much domain authority for it’s URL over these years.
Domain authority is how valuable a domain name is to Google.
The more valuable a domain name is to Google; the more Google trusts that domain name.
The more that Google trusts a domain name, the higher up on the SERPS ( Search Engine Results Pages) the site’s pages go.
Now, the next more important part to understand is why does this matter?
Why does it matter to you if ActiveRain has a high domain authority?
Because of backlinks!
When you have a blog on ActiveRain you get a link back from your ActiveRain account to your website.
This is called a backlink and this is super valuable.
The reason it is so valuable is that when ActiveRain links to your website, ActiveRain is telling Google that you are important enough to link to.
This in turn helps Google to trust your website more.
Just because you have a website does not make you legit in Google’s eyes and you could be a spam website or a hacker…
Google does not know who you are. Google will only care about your website once it starts to be linked to by other websites and social media platforms and by people talking about your website online.
You may wonder why Google counts that link to your website when the blog is yours on ActiveRain. This is part of what we call, “vertical SEO”.
Google does not look at your blog on ActiveRain as being “your” blog. It looks at the domain URL. The domain URL is ActiveRain.com. You do not own ActiveRain. You do not own the domain URL.
This is like magic:). A little ninja trick perhaps, in a way.
When we post your house story on your ActiveRain blog, we are adding a link inside of your content back to the article on your website blog.
This is sending that signal we talked about to Google bots to alert them that this article is important.
This will over time help your website:
- Get indexed by Google faster
- Get recognized and trusted by Google for your keywords
- Help with your online reputation and brand mentions
Many companies and individuals pay a lot of money for backlinking campaigns.
The value of a backlink from ActiveRain is around $400 per month. That is what I can easily charge to produce a backlink from ActiveRain to a website. But ActiveRain members don’t have to pay $400 per month for this strong and authoritative backlink.
To add even more value you can be interlinking in the content that you are writing on ActiveRain – linking from post to post and back to your profile from inside of a post, etc.
Interlinking to and from deep internal pages is something that Google bots pay attention to. They are crawling from one page to another but ONLY if they are linked. If they are not linked, Google bots can not find them. This is one of the biggest problems I see when people come to us for help, their SEO is not working out for them because they are not deep linking.
You have to get a Rainmaker account on ActiveRain in order to get the benefits from the domain authority and also so that the public can view and read your blog posts. The free version won’t work for this.
This is the paid version unless you were grandfathered in many years ago. For instance, I started blogging on ActiveRain when it was free in 2007. So therefore, I will never have to pay for my account since I was one of the founding members who added a lot of content and helped ActiveRain to gain the authority it has today.
The current pricing is like $59 per month and as you gain points by writing content, adding comments, replying to people, etc.,the price is reduced over time until you don’t have to pay a monthly fee. You get rewarded for participation and adding value.
However, to start off, I can get you a discount. You can use my coupon code and get ActiveRain for only $99 per year. What a wonderful opportunity to not just get backlinks but also for a great price. It is a no brainer:).
If you would like to have your discount coupon code and only pay $99 per year for a backlink worth $400 per month… click here – and fill out this form, I will be adding you to my list and send you the code.
Another important benefit to adding blogging about your listings and adding your listing stories to your ActiveRain blog is that your ActiveRain blog post will often be indexed much faster than your website and also much higher on the Google search pages than your website.
Even if you blog like crazy on your own WordPress site, which is important to do, you may not get page one or page two rankings with your own little website that does not have much authority.
However, since Google likes and trusts ActiveRain, Google may just reward your post on a high domain authority site like ActiveRain with page one results!
Does this mean it will happen every time? No.
Sometimes it works like this and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on the amount of competition you have and how into SEO they are and also how consistent you are with your own blogging.
It is also your commitment of continuous blogging that helps raise your site and your ActiveRain site. High tide rises all ships.
And be for-warned- you can gain a lot of blogging momentum in the beginning of your blogging journey but then after months of months of wondering where everyone is — all your traffic you just know was going to come – you may feel like quitting. Don’t quit.
When you stop blogging for a while, it takes about 3 months of blogging every day to get back to where you were before you paused on your blogging tasks. Remember, we can do this for you.
Last but not least; when you post your amazing and informative listing stories on ActiveRain, you may just get a referral!!!
Referrals are the lifeblood of a REALTOR’s business. Getting that qualified buyer for one of your listings is like gold.
There are many real estate agents blogging on this amazing ActiveRain platform and they are reading your listing stories… so make them interesting… you never know when an agent may be scrolling by your blog and see the post about the listing that is the perfect fit for one of their clients.
Don’t underestimate the power of paying it forward by sharing your knowledge and wisdom in a community of like minded people.
Make sure you use my coupon code and get ActiveRain for only $99 per year.
Remember to click here to access your code. Make sure to read the short instructions on how to make this work for you.
Does this all seem overwhelming to you right now? Don’t worry, that is normal! There is help to save the day:). We can help you with all of this. Click here to learn more about listing marketing and how we can help you get your listings to shine for your sellers!
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