During our Week of ActiveRain,  we covered a lot of ground!  Including:

• Comment on Blog Posts
• Writing a Blog Post
• Inserting Widgets into Your Blog
• Engage with Groups

For the final day, I'd like to bring the various pieces together by explaining a bit about what makes AR tick.

Points!

With AR, you can get points for all kinds of activities.  The activities that can start to add up include: (1) Writing blog posts, (2) leaving comments, (3) Inviting others to AR, and (4) getting "featured."

It's kind of standard operating procedure for AR devotees to say that they don't engage on the site for points... It's all about the community.  However, the reality is that the more points you get, the more likely you will be featured in critical searches. To give just one example, if you were a Calabasas agent, then you want to show up high on this list because this page shows up fairly well in search engines and can directly lead to consumers contacting you.

At the same time, I think you'll find it is much easier to do well on the site if you play by accepted community rules.

So in terms of the four areas that generate the most points, you already know how to (1) write blog posts and (2) leave comments, so I'm going to focus on the other two areas.

3) Inviting people is easy... You only need to go to this page and dip into your contact list to invite other real estate professionals.

4) More interesting is getting featured on the homepage of AR.   There's no science to this... But there is an art.  From my (limited) observations, the articles that get featured tend to be pretty generalized advice for other agents. So if you're willing to share your knowledge with the community, you're much more likely to get featured (and the influx of comments and points that ensues).

To do

For today, write one blog post on any topic that interests you.  And look through other people's blog posts in order to leave one comment.   

It's been a blast watching the 4RealzEd attendeees who are new to blogging take the plunge.  I'm seeing more than a few people get a real kick out of writing posts and watching the comments pile up. 

And remember to post to the 4RealzEd group on ActiveRain: http://activerain.com/groups/4realzed


Preparation for Next Week

So far in the first four weeks we've made a ton of progress... You should now have profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn, Trulia, ActiveRain, Google, Zillow and Inman.   In addition, we've gotten in-depth on both LinkedIn and ActiveRain, as well as had a week where Jim showed you how to focus on keywords that will be used in upcoming weeks.

For next week, I'm going to talk about two things that I hope you'll find extremely useful.  One is branding, and, in particular, what you should be thinking about when you create your own website.  The other item I'm going to cover is Feed Readers and, in particular, we're going to focus on getting the most out of Google Reader.

The following week I have a real treat.   Jeff Turner has put together a week of lesson on how to effectively engage with the Flickr community.  I reached out to Jeff because I'm really not the right person for that particular subject.  I think Flickr can be an amazing social network for people who really appreciate quality photography and Jeff is that type of person!

For Non-4RealzEd Attendees
If you're wondering what this is all about, I've teamed up with another internet marketing expert (Jim marks) to create a four-hour lecture along with a 90-day follow up course.   The idea behind the course is that I want to take agents who are interested in technology and internet marketing, but aren't necessarily "savvy" and I want to teach them how they can start to produce results.   If you're interested in learning more, check out our website: 4Realz Internet Marketing Education.

And if you know of someone in Southern California who would be interested in this type of education, let them know that our next course starts in one week in Pasadena, CA!