First say to yourself what you would be;
and then do what you have to do.
~Epictetus
I'd never heard of Epictetus before I went looking for a quote for this blog post. In fact, I wanted a quote that actually used the word 'inspiration' because that's what we are calling our new weekly blog assignments, the Inspiration Station. But something in the sage words of this Greek philosopher rang out to me.
I think in most of us, is an ability to be better. Better in what? Well, if Epictetus is to be believed, that's up to you. But ingrained in us is this ability that if we focus on something, if we tell ourselves what we would be, then we can do what we have to do to become that. I would have loved to sit on a rock in an olive orchard (are they orchards?) in the year 100 and listen to this former slave break life down into these sayings, that 1900 years later, would to many of us be self evident.........and yet still as hard to put into action as it must have been 1900 years ago. For Epictetus, inspiration came from within, you just had to visualize it and then do it.
Inspiration comes in so many forms. For each of us, what we choose to draw inspiration from is as much about who we are as it is anything. Here at ActiveRain, we like to draw inspiration from our members. Almost everything we've done by way of development on the site has been inspired by our members. Now it's our turn to attempt to inspire you.
Each week, the Inspiration Station will be dolling out an assignment on topics that you can choose to write about for your blog. We will be pouring over our Google Analytics and paying extra special attention to what consumers are searching for now and what they searched for during these same times in previous years. Then we will be asking you to write about topics that have the potential to get your blog good solid traffic from consumers in your market.
Not all of the topics will be directly related to real estate but they will all be a chance for you to create content that is being sought by people that should be doing business with you.
We will not be giving out guaranteed bonus points as we've done in the past for challenges of this nature. The bonus will come from the increased traffic to your blog posts that we hope to generate. These will be posts that many of you are already writing because you have a few years of blogging experience under your belt. For our newer bloggers, this will be a chance to understand some of the patterns we see in consumer search behavior and an opportunity to take advantage of those patterns to drive additional readers to your blog.
Don't be shocked if every once in a while (read: for every assignment) we pick a few of the best examples to feature on the home page and magically a few thousand points appear in your tally.
Starting on Monday, we will have our first assignment from the Inspiration Station so keep your eyes peeled for that.
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