SUCCESS IN THE RAIN!
SUCCESS IN THE RAIN! Here's my story. January was a slow month for me. I had been off the grid for 2 months because my husband had heart surgery and I became his caretaker. That is, a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, caretaker.
Anyway, after cleaning the house from top to bottom, organizing my shelves and cleaning closets I ran out of things to do or things I wanted to do. So I decided to tackle ActiveRain again. I became a member in 2008, but was unable to do anything with AR because I was too busy at that time.
So here I am in January trying to discover how to do this ActiveRain thing. The first thing I did was to read posts. No comments yet because everything seemed to be said that I might want to say. Then I took some AR University classes. Not participating, just listening. Finally, in late January I began commenting. At that point I had about 4000 points. My immediate goal was to learn everything I could about blogging and making my blog site look inviting. I'm still working on that.
My second goal was to over take my colleagues and become #1 in Alameda. That was a mighty goal since #1 has 83,000 points and has been blogging forever and I had a paltry 4,000 points. I decided I should set my sites a little lower. I picked several Rainers who had 10,000+ points. By February 13, I had accumulated 10637 and was having fun commenting and even blogging. My first blog was on February 18. It was awful, but a beginning and ActiveRainers were very helpful.
After that I found that one could gain more points by participating in challenges. I found the "Surviving the Serengetichallenge," read the chapters I was required to read, took the quiz and found that I was a cheetah. Then I blogged about what I had read and that I was a cheetah. This was a good way for me to develop my blogging skills since I had a ready made topic.
I found another challenge, preparing a "press release about another ActiveRainer". I previously commented on a blog in which Karen Kruschka had written about her volunteer work reading to the deaf. This caught my eye since being deaf by definition means not being able to hear, so how could you read to the deaf? I interviewed Karen, prepared the press release and posted it to a free press release site. This was a wonderful challenge because I got to know Karen and her husband Art and I let more people know about her volunteer work for the deaf, a worthy cause.
Since I began in January I've been commenting everyday and blogging occasionally. When I reached 22,663 points on March 6 I had to change my goal. My goal was to overtake the person in the #2 spot in Alameda. At that time, he had 30,991 points. I finally overtook Garrick Werdmuller who has been #2 for as long as I can remember. He is probably blogging and commenting at this very moment in the hopes of flying past me. But at least for now I am still #2. Hooray! And for that accomplishment ActiveRain has"featured" me, whatever that means.
I know being #2 is not what everyone wants, but I am exhilarated that I have come so far in three months. I am still learning, I need to concentrate on SEO and changes to my website. But being #2 is very exciting and makes me want to do more, a lot more.
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