We are celebrating our 9 year anniversary on ActiveRain.
We joined ActiveRain in June of 2007.
I have told our story a few times in our anniversary blog posts.
I learned about blogging and was looking for a friendly platform to blog on after having been in some online forums, ( that dates me:)). This is before Facebook went mainstream.
One of the forums I was in there was a comment about ActiveRain. So I went to ActiveRain and started to read some blogs. That is when I found:
Sally Cheeseman's blog with all her local content about Hawaii.
So then I started our blog. After I filled out our profile I discovered accidently that I earned some points. I had no idea what the points were for. Then I got some more points, and then some more. The point system is what really caught my interest. Dangle a carrot and I am hooked!
Here is my very first post I wrote on ActiveRain. If you are new and have a fear of writing your first blog post- think outside of yourself and you will get over your fear. When the focus is no longer on you... you can let go of the fear and start to blog. That is what I did:
http://activerain.com/blogsview/131823/what-a-great-place-active-rain-is--
The second thing was the comments from members. I started to get comments which in turn motivated me to write comments on other member blog posts. I learned early to reach out to others and pay it forward. This in turn would build relationships. Relationships that stand the test of time on- line and offline. I would write between 30 to 40 comments each day to make the inroads.
Then came my first featured post. This was during the time that there were volunteer moderators on AR. I believe people work harder for praises than for raises so this was another brilliant part of ActiveRain.
At that time, there were not many members as compared to today. There was no ActiveRain University. There were no how to blog tutorials, there was no Q & A, there was not much at all in terms of support and learning the ropes in the rain. So we all kind of flew by the seat of our pants learning the ins and outs of ActiveRain.
We made some very good friends. Many of these bloggers went off to blog solely on their own wordpress sites. Without these friendships I don't think I would have stayed. Cyndee for instance, taught me who was in the "know" in ActiveRain at the time in order to get more visibility and also about which groups to join.
So many bloggers here made it so much fun and rewarding including:
Bob Stewart and Sally Cheeseman
Cyndee Haydon, Missy Caulk, and Lenn Harley
Patricia Kennedy and Jason Crouch and Todd Clark
Margaret Woda, Neil Bloom, and Sharon Simms
There are others who no longer have an AR profile, that were instrumental in my learning the ropes here on ActiveRain.
It takes consistancy and work to get ahead on ActiveRain and here are our results in 9 years:
It was the worst time in the South Florida market that we had ever encountered.
The same year we joined ActiveRain was the same year that over 10,000 agents in our board left real estate and did not renew their MLS and NAR dues.
We had witnessed the worst real estate market crash and knew many brokers who were filing bankrupcty and closing down their offices. It was brutal.
About 6 months before the crash Nestor told me that there was going to be a huge real estate bust.
One of the first rules of business to learn is to be ready to shift.
He told me we had to figure out what we were to do in our business. Prior to the bust, we worked in land assemblages and with developers like Pulte Homes, Centex Homes and other builders and developers. Of course when there is a real estate bust, the developers stop buying land assemblages. They stop building.
Nestor had experience in REOs and Short Sales when we worked in Houston.
We decided to start working in short sales because we were not interested in niching in REOs.
ActiveRain was the perfect match. That was the beginning of our journey in the rain...
The rest is history...
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