John,

I would guess that right now it might not be for many agents. The service providers can certainly take advantage of it. No question about that. Loan officers could really use it to target agents in their area.

Brokerages could certainly use it for recruiting to target agents in their area. From the agent perspective, right now it takes a little digging to get to how you can use it. (although once they spread it to localism, it would certainly be worth while).

After talking with Jonathan, the one thing they surely do not want to do is have any ads along side individual posts. Anywhere that there is a collaboration of posts (or a collaboration of profiles) will eventually be looked at for opening up to ads.

There is a time coming soon, when people will be able to get RSS feeds (or maybe email based subscriptions) for cities and communities from localism (and therefor from your posts on ActiveRain). That would be a place where the posts are collaborative and therefor may be looked at for advertising. It's kind of like google, you write something good and the client gets your good content...........don't feel like writing and would rather pay, well then they can see your ad as well.

Right now, as I think through it, I could see maybe an agent from Arizona advertising to agents in Washington who might have clients that are getting to that age where they are sick of the rain here in the winter. There are certainly situations like that in many markets. Tahoe to San Fran, Florida to New York, You probably have a market that you might like to target for relocation buyers. Linking that ad to a post about what you do with relocation buyers, how you treat them, what you are willing to pay for referrals........that sort of thing.

Or maybe agents targeting anyone from a given state or county (although Ben says the county targeting is hard for non logged in members) to push more traffic to their personal blog. I think I have seen an ad trying that. (for those that blog outside ActiveRain.)

I don't know.........just trying to get my head around it. 

Sally,

Everytime you are searching around the site and you are seeing

that is an impression of that ad. If a member had bid for that space, you would see their ad there. You seeing it on your screen is an impression. if you go to a different portion of the site and see it again, that is another impression. You can target it to only members, anyone on the site, just agents, just loan officers, etc.  If you target it to everyone, the public will see it. But, you can target it to just the public from a certain area, so only people that are looking on the site with an IP address from Florida for instance.

Yes, you are bidding against others for placement. a bid of $3.00 is for 1000 impressions (or 3/10 of a cent per impression). You will notice that most places you see the sponsor the community picture I put in earlier, you see it more than once. So if you are bidding $3.00 and someone else is bidding $4.00, both of you may appear. But, if you are only targeting agents that are logged in, your ad may not appear to everyone.

You will always have a credit in your account until your $$$ is used up. So even though your ad may not appear now at a bid of $1.35 per 1000 impressions because someone else is outbidding you, once there $$$ dries up, your ad would kick in.

You can call me if you want me to try to explain it over the phone.  

Kathy,

I've talked to Jonathan about this and he is very opposed to having advertising on your blog. There will not be advertising on anyone's blog. Only the areas of the site where there is compiled content. So whether that be compiled profiles (the state, county, or city pages for example) or compiled blogs (like the blog dashboard area).  

No one reading on your blog as a whole, or on a particular post of yours would see advertising.

You might have to put up with looking at someone else's ad though when you write your post..........but hey, someone has to pay the server bill!!! :)  

Kathy,

well 2 cents and 5 cents..............you're almost to the $10 limit......:)

In all reality, right now as an agent, you wouldn't necessarily need to advertise to draw consumer attention to yourself. I think that by writing good quality content you will be drawing attention to yourself. It's just like in google. If you google a term, there are the organic results and the paid advertising. Have you ever clicked on theh paid stuff? I never do. I always click on the organic content. The stuff that is there because it really has value (most of the time). Yet, people still pay to advertise. Let the people who want to pay to get exposure pay.........then none of the rest of us who just want to create good content have to pay.  If you don't have something good to point the consumer to if they do click on your ad, it isn't going to help you at all anyways.

I think the initial focus of the guys at ActiveRain is on service providers advertising to agents. Let the service providers pay the bills. They stand to benefit the most directly from their involvement here. Although, a guy like Jeff Turner, a prolific contributor here, who has posted a ton of great content may never have to pay to advertise because he does it so well with the content he provides. 

It isn't going to matter if some agent in Poincianna Florida tries to advertise. Broker Bryant has great content.

I would say to sit back and see if agents in your area start paying to advertise to consumers. If they do, then they have chosen that their way of supporting the network is by paying...........your way of supporting is by "work(ing) at making this a good community". I think there is something to be said for both routes.