A follow up report from our little non-ActiveRain blog tour experiment this week. For those of you who missed my original invitation, we visited the blogs of members who maintain a separate blog outside of ActiveRain.
I visited a lot of great sites and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I liked it so much, in fact, that I am going to post the details on a much better blog tour in a few days, based on the lessons I learned from this one. I've got some ideas for improving upon the concept and I think it should be fun and beneficial to those who participate.
Here are some of my observations, in no particular order:
- There was a huge range in the technology that bloggers are using. I came away with lots of ideas on formatting, plugins, links, etc. All that clicking was worth my time. And, as promised, it did not take 3 hours.
- My traffic was up that day, and it was fun to have people stop by. Even some agents without separate blogs joined us on our tour. That is cool. As you know, I love getting comments, and it was a treat to have so many comments on that other blog. It can get kind of lonely over there.
- Some bloggers didn't have comment features enabled. I thought that was interesting. But then, I don't fight much comment spam yet on my blog because its only been there about a month. Even though the majority of my posts don't have comments on them, I personally prefer to have the comment feature turned on. On more than one blog it was difficult to leave a comment even when the feature was present. To me, if the comments aren't turned on, its a website not a blog.
- A couple of blogs made it pretty challenging to figure out how to contact the author. I bet most of us never visit our own blog and try to navigate it as a consumer might. I really liked having others take a look at my blog, just for this reason. Thanks for stopping by guys!
- Content varied widely as one would expect, since real estate is local.
- Some people were using mostly activerain content (their own, of course) and others were writing all new material on the other blog. A few, like myself, had a combination of AR material and more locally geared stuff.
- If you invite a bunch of bloggers over, don't get caught with your sidebars down, like I did. Couldn't have happened on a worse day. Jay Thompson left me a message and let me know I had a problem that I had no idea how to fix. I spent a bit of time fretting before I got the situation resolved.
- No, you don't get points for commenting on non-ActiveRain blogs. Sorry Kristal. You'll have to take that one up with Matt & Caleb.
I have to say, I really enjoyed it and I appreciate everyone who joined my little odyssey through the blogosphere. There were some VERY impressive blogs on this list, and a few of the bloggers have only been doing this for a very short time. You would not know by looking.
For those of you who missed it, you might want to take a look at those blogs that were on the tour. Even for those of you without 'other' blogs, there are some exceptional ideas out there.
I am sure others of you who participated had observations, so please feel free to add 'em. And I am hopeful for even greater participation in my upcoming blog tour. So consider yourself notified: company is coming! And be on the lookout for details of my next blogtour. The more the merrier!
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