Stephanie,

That is essentially how it would work if you chose not to sponsor your community. However, I would contend that it is the combination of the two actions, the sponsorship and content that give you the best chance of demonstrating your expertise in the area.

I would say that taken on their own, having the great content is going to trump someone just coming and sponsoring a community. Consumers are smart, and they are going to realize that you are the one who created the content that is educating them about the community.

Susan,

"I can't get the chance to sponsor a community - Stuart (which I am ranked #3) because it is taken.  I paid $9 for localism for a neighborhood.  So does this mean I will never have a shot at my city?" 

Currently, there is no sponsoring of cities on ActiveRain, only communities within the city.

"Is this a yearly contract?  How does this impacat my localism - neighborhood then?"

No, it is month to month. If you have a Localism sponsorship, it will continue to be there and you will add on the corresponding sponsorship of that community on ActiveRain. Call me if you are still confused and I will try to explain it to you in better detail over the phone.

Robert,

Call me any time, I'm back and done digging.

Susan,

If someone is already sponsoring a community on Locaiism for $9, that community is not available on ActiveRain, that is correct. They are being allowed to sponsor that community as a part of the $9 they pay for Localism.

Regarding newer members getting a thank you and a deal, the premise of the thank you is that we are thanking them for supporting us by maintaining their Localism sponsorships. I'm not sure how we could thank the newer folks. Maybe you have a suggestion?

Elizabeth,

We hope it is continually evolving. Having these pages inside ActiveRain allows us to devote more resources to making them dynamic and cool. We have some things already planned to add and we have no question that our members will make some great suggestions to help us come up with even more ideas.

Lori, It will be the 25 neighborhoods that someone can sponsor. Right now, no one will be able to sponsor the city of Tulsa, or any city for that matter.

Sorry, no discounts for people paying for hit router.

Lori,

You can get as many sponsorships of communities as you would like for $19. There are no additional sponsorships available at $9. Only the people already holding a Localism sponsorship will get the $9 price on their communities on ActiveRain.

You wrote: 'i think sometimes your systems do not favor newcomers'. We try to have our systems be neutral, favoring neither newcomers or old timers. Anyone, up until a few days ago, was able to sponsor Localism communities. The system for doing so has been in place for a long time. Whenever a new person signs up, they are sent links that they can read that attempt to explain many of the intricacies of ActiveRain. Whether a person reads them or not is another story (I'm not the type that reads that stuff when I join something, I go through it by trial and error, and probably miss some stuff as a result) Sometimes it's just easier being a veteran. That's the way of the world, not something we created.

Valerie,

Right now you will need to check the same community on Localism to see if it is available. If someone is currently sponsoring it on Localism, then they will maintain that sponsorship for the community on ActiveRain. Otherwise, on Wednesday morning  will be the first time you will be able to obtain this information on ActiveRain.

Kathryn,

You can see what we define as a city by navigating to your state page, then selecting your County. The list of cities will then be on the left hand side of the page. You can see what our members have defined as communities by clicking on a certain city and looking on the left for a list of cities. In very small towns, we are going to have to evaluate how we allow members to sponsor pages. I don't know that we have a concrete answer right this minute. It's possible that each small town could be considered a community and therefor able to be sponsorsed.

Bob,

Currently the sponsors will not be able to delete unrelated posts. I agree that we need to find out some way to allow the community to police content that is placed in the wrong place. Of course, we can remove it if someone notifies us and we will. I think it Localism, the problem was more prevalent at the city level instead of the community level. Someone trying to spam usually doesn't want to limit their garbage to just one community when they could liter up a whole city.

Lori,

Communities are $19 per community. I'm sorry someone already had that sponsorship, I'm not sure how we could have had something in place to even the playing field in that instance.

Gina,

First part, you got it.

Second part. If you created 8 communities in a city and only sponsored one, then your info would rotate through the other 7. Someone else could lock up any of those seven, but if no one did, your info would rotate through those areas as the sponsor. If someone then locked up one of them, you and that person would rotate through the remaining six communities.

Is there overlapping in the monthly price if it's same community? I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Could you clarify?

Katerina,

Localism will remain in place for the time being. However, we believe that a new structure on ActiveRain will allow us to return results in the search engines that we were previously unable to obtain, therefor resulting in more traffic for everyone.

You could show up in three places for a less desireable search term, or in two places for a highly desireable one. Likewise, you could show up three times on page one, positions 3, 5 and 7. Or you could show up once in position #1. I would rather be in position one. We are confident the new changes will drive a lot more traffic to our members in the end.

Elizabeth,

I'll be back to address your concern in a moment. Let me answer some easier ones while I confirm one technical aspect of my response to you.

Andi,

In terms of letting someone else do the legwork and then sponsoring their area, I would say this works much the same as google. If you have the money, you can just pay to have your content displayed in the sponsored results. Or, you can bust your butt and get your site to rank organically. Almost every successful online marketer that I know, that really makes money marketing their services and runs a serious business uses a combination of the two. They aim to get their content on the page, and they reinforce that content with paid advertising. Both avenues work, but the combination of the two is the most compelling.

You wrote:

"This latest tool is benefitting ActiveRain more than the members". Our benefit is to create revenue, your benefit is that we create additional pages on ActiveRain, that did not exist previously, that we believe will have a significant impact on the amount of traffic we generate for our members. It's called Quid Pro Quo, you do something for me, I do something for you. If you don't believe there is a balance between what you receive and what you give, I would not expect you to participate. We strive to provide that value so there is a good balance between the value we deliver and what people are willing to pay for that value, because in the end, just like you, we are a business and the servers don't stay humming without revenue to help pay for them.

Lori,

Let's say that there are 20 communities in your area and you just choose to sponsor 1. And two other agents each sponsor one. So there are three that are sponsored and 17 that are not. You each get to have exclusive sponsorship of the one you pay for, then for the other 17, the three of you rotate as the community sponsor for those areas, unless someone else comes in and sponsors it.

So with one sponsorship, you get exposure in all the unsponsored areas of your city.

Peter and Linda,

I completely understand that pet peeve you mentioned. I guess my only counter would be that we are all available to answer any questions you may have over the phone or via email. Please do not hesitate to contact me directly if you ever have questions about anything.

You got it Andi!

Corinne,

This was a big issue when we first launched Localism. All the communities were input by our members. But you know what they say, garbage in, garbage out. I would assume that no one in your market would go in and sponsor a community that didn't make any sense (or wasn't in that city) so it's not 100% necessary to eliminate them prior to the sponsorships being available, since no one is likely to sponsor them.

When Localism launched, we decided the best way to deal with these wrong communities was through a process of atrophy. Essentially, the ones that were never used would shrink on the vine and die and the ones that were posted to more often would become more prevalent and get more exposure. That is how we continue to intend on dealing with communities that were created in error for now.

Chris,

Thank you for the feedback. Currently, all the communities present are things that have been entered by our members. If there are communities/neighborhoods missing, it's because they have never been added. The ability to add new neighborhoods has been temporarily shut down for the time being. It will be restored so that users can enter missing communities.

If there are communities that should not be there, it is the result of an overzealous person entering them back when we awarded points for creating new communities. When we get through this and the smoke clears a little bit, I would be willing to have you help me get your market straightened out regarding what communities show up where, if you have the time.

Lenn,

I sent you an email after looking into your specific case to see if we can get it resolved.

Michael,

Technically, yes you would have to buy them all to secure them all. However, the more likely scenario, and the one I would suggest you consider is to purchase the most important one (or two or three) and secure that one. Then your information will show up in the other communities you do not sponsor in a round robin with anyone else that sponsors a community in that city.

Ted,

I can get that cleared up. Please send me a link to the correct one and the duplicate (let me know which is which) and I will get it resolved. Otherwise, yes you are correct, you don't currently have to do anything to secure your community on AR as long as you have it sponsored on Localism.

Yes Renee, that is the pre-release shots of the screen. We will load all the Localism sponsorships on Tuesday night, so as long as you are sponsoring it on Localism, it will carry over.

Elizabeth,

School districts are certainly a way that someone could break down a city. I would imagine we have some cities on the site where users did exactly that. Yes, when we first launched Localism, we gave points as incentive for adding communities. As you can tell if you go through some areas, some people got completely out of control in an attempt to garner as many points as possible so we stopped awarding points.

I will answer all these questions in the upcoming webinars:

http://activerain.com/blogsview/1777628/come-learn-about-the-recent-launch-of-activerain-community-pages

John,

We have those photos stored and we are looking for the best way to incorporate them into the new pages. I think that is a few steps away still.

Christa,

Very good observation and I agree. Localism was not supported in the fashion we had hoped to support it. Bringing this content into ActiveRain gives us the ability to dedicate more resources to making it great.

You'll already notice that the column of the ActiveRain community page closely matches the width of the regular blog column, whereas the Localism colun was much more narrow.

From a traffic perspective, we believe that having the content on the ActiveRain domain in this format will greatly increase the traffic our members receive to their posts.

Judy and Glenda, I don't agree that people do not search for sub divisions online. I contend that the closer they get to actually purchasing something, the more specific their searches become. 5 years ago you couldn't find information about a sub-division if you tried. Now, with the advent of hyper local blogging, information is available down to this level.

Go ask Debe Maxwell if buyers look for specific sub divisions. She is closing business as a result of writing about them. Buyers online searching are finding her when they are much closer to actually buying.......they know exactly where they want to live. She is getting traffic and clients because of writing about specific condo buildings. We have hundreds of members that are attracting buyers (and sellers) with posts about specific sub divisions.

I will agree that they search in towns......but those people are on average 8 months from buying something. When they start to search at a community level, our research shows (granted that research was limited to our brokerage over a two year period in Western Washington) that they buy in half that amount of time, 4 months.

There are a lot of members here that will tell you that if they find you because of a post you did about a sub division, those folks are REALLY close to actually making a purchase decision. So what would you rather have, ten 'internet leads' who all searched for 'homes for sale (in your city). Or one person who contacted you directly because they searched out a specific sub division and found your content about that area?

The person looking for info about the specific sub division is going to be much more likely to buy in the next 30-60 days.

All of that being said, if you only sponsor one sub division (synonymous with community or neighborhood) in your city, and no one else sponsors any, you will be displayed as the sponsor for all the unclaimed communities as well. If there are two of you sponsoring one each in a city, then the two of you will rotate and display on the unclaimed communities.

If one of you has four communities sponsored and one has one, then you will rotate on the unclaimed communities at the same ratio as your sponsorships, with the person having four showing up four times (in the unclaimed areas) for every one time you show up.

In many cases, folks will be able to sponsor one community in their market and rotate through the others free of charge.

If your area is so small that it makes no sense to sponsor a community, then I would ask that you hang tight for if/when we release city level sponsorships for smaller areas.

Meredith,

In order to find your area, go up the top of most any page on ActiveRain and click on the 'states' link. That will present a drop down with all the state abbreviations. Click on your state. If you are in a popular area (meaning there is a lot of content in your city) your city will appear in the list of cities on the left hand side of the page.

If you are in a city with less content, you will need to scroll down and select the appropriate county. From the county page then, you will find a list of cities on the left. Clicking on the city page will bring you to that city page and a list of communities will be displayed on the left. Clicking on any of the communities will take you to that community.

Consumers will find the page by going to Google and typing in that name of that community (possibly in conjunction with 'homes for sale' or 'real estate' or other desireable keyword phrases that let Google know they are looking for information similar to what our members are providing)

Susan,

If your smaller towns, cities or villages don't have sub divisions (or desired areas that people identify with) then I agree with you, no one is going to search for them. In this case, it would be best to hang tight until if/when we release sponsorships at a city level.

Leslie

I'm just telling you what I've seen based on five years of generating and converting leads in four states, Washington State, Maryland, Virginia and California. We had a site that generated over 300 leads a day in those four states. In the year 2005 we know that people who used hyper local terms closed 4 times as fast as people that used city terms.

I also have the experience of a website that generates 2.5 million visitors every month. I have access to see exactly what those consumers are typing in the search engines that ultimately lands them on ActiveRain. If you don't believe they are typing in the names of sub divisions, you are wrong. I don't know what else to say on this matter.

If you want to continue to claw and scratch to make headway on the keyword phrases that relate to your city, I know you can do it. There are lots of people that have climbed their way to the top of the search engines by creating great content and using solid SEO techniques. (Many of them are using AR to link back to their site and build up the inbound links). But if you want to target buyers that are much closer to buying something than a traditional buyer, writing about sub-divisions, communities, condo complexes....really anything more granular than a city is what you want to be doing.

Let's only talk about the last 4 years, since prior to that there was no information online about sub divisions. So prior to four years ago, of course no one asked about them, they had no idea what they were called or the difference between the two. However, with the advent of blogging as a way to sell homes, and more developed IDX platforms that display additional fields, buyers looking through different areas are very aware of exactly what they want. If they've looked at 100 homes online, and they like 5 that they've seen and they know 4 of those 5 are in Persimmon Fields........what do you think they're going to do the next time they go back to Google to do a search? They are going to search for Persimmon Fields.

It doesn't matter if you believe me or not, I look at our Google Analytics every day and I see thousands of these types of searches every day. If we had all of our members writing this kind of content I would see a lot more of these types of searches.......why? Because they would be finding your blog post about Persimmon Fields. But you don't think are they searching for that, so you don't write about it. That's alright, someone will and that will be the person they find.

Paige,

Are these cities/towns or are they designated as communities?

Betty,

Leander is a city (or town, I'm using them synonymously) if I'm not mistaken. Cities are not available to be sponsored.

Stephanie,

You will just pay $9 once, and that will get you both the Localism sponsorship you had previously and the new AR community page sponsorship. This only holds for those that were previously sponsoring Localism communities.

(and that is the third time I've done that today, left a comment while logged in as someone else after helping them with something, sorry)

Glenda,

I have no problem agreeing to disagree. :-)

We used to generate a lot of leads in Northern Virginia (during the years 2003-2005) and many of them were generated by community level searches.

If you believe they have most likely selected their agent, then it doesn't make sense for you to market to them at that level, I agree. But if they haven't selected an agent and you forgo writing content to target them, then someone else will be their agent.

I included a screen shot of our google analytics for the last 30 days for one of the search terms in a community in your city of Herndon. Chantilly Highlands. This is just in the last 30 days......

I could pull up similar information for other communities in your area. This doesn't demonstrate that they do or don't have an agent of course, but I want them when they are closer to buying. Even if one of these folks doesn't have an agent, closing one deal, because I pay $19/month to sponsor Chantilly Highlands is worth it in my business. I saw homes in that area selling for $650,000........

One other thing to consider.........you don't have to sign up for 100 areas. In Herndon there are about 20 communities. If you sign up for one, you rotate through the other unclaimed communities. If you are the only one sponsoring in a city, you appear on every community page as the sponsor. So you could conceivable sponsor the most desirable area, then rotate through the other areas free of charge.

The reason I am so passionate about this is because I know that targeting people at a hyper local level works. We have hundreds (if not thousands) of agents on ActiveRain who are having very good success doing this.

Let me try to approach it from a different perspective. Let's say you agree they are doing the searches, but you think they already have an agent. Then I would contend that this is something you could use as a tool to get more listings. If we know that folks get more specific the closer they get to buying, then it would make sense that this is a tool that would be useful for a listing agent. To be able to rank at the top of the search engines when someone is searching for a specific sub-division or community, it would be a great tool to have in your arsenal to be able to show sellers that you can get the best exposure for their listing to the people that are REALLY interested in buying a home like theirs.