Active Rain's membership of real estate professionals seems to be about 200,000. I believe when I first joined up that there were about 50,000.
The other day I heard on Bloomburg News that bloggers are leaving that practice by the droves, now favoring posting their thoughts on Facebook and Twitter.
Apparently posters are finding they are getting their messages out to more people, and a more focused group of people.
The most hits I ever got on an Active Rain post was about 24,000. It was a silly post about whether or not a person should consider getting a tattoo. But for the first several of years, most of the time I got about 100 - 200 hits per blog post.
I wrote hundreds of Active Rain posts, mostly posts about a business I've been active in since 1964. (Less than 1% throughout the US and Canada have been in it for as long as I have.)
One or two AR members have collected over 1 million AR points for their devoted participation. I'm at 225,126. I seem to remember that makes me the 3rd highest in Dallas...maybe 4th.
In my own case, maybe 15 times I had one of my posts "featured," but probably less.
I never conquered the formula for writing about what readers would care enough about for the AR judges to think they should pick my post as a feature.
Everyone knows that the posts that are chosen to be "featured" seem to get zillions of hits and a half-zillion comments. So everyone would like their post to be one of the ones picked; me, too. It even adds encouragement in the writer's eyes to post more.
Recently I wrote about Dallas' elite area, Highland Park. Someone found it, and it began being passed around among the Highland Park residents and other Realtors who serve the area, so it garnered about 700 hits.
But in the main, for the last couple of years most of my AR posts have interested somewhere between 25 and 75 people; more toward the lower number than the higher one.
And even then, it would be narcissistic for me to think everyone of the hits actually read the entire blog from beginning to end. So maybe what I write is not of interest to many more people than just me.
And then there are the old friends, friends I made on AR that I don't hear from anymore. How about Bill Roberts for an example? I miss them.
So even before the Bloomburg report, I had decided that blogging may be going the way of the CB radio. Nevertheless, for whatever the reason, continuing to devote substantial time to developing an AR post may be fast approaching both uninspiring to this writer and an unprofitable use of his time.
BILL CHERRY, REALTORS
DALLAS - PARK CITIES
Since 1964
214 503-8563
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