So this outside blog thing looks pretty decent.  At first word of it, I ran (figuratively) to my ActiveRain account and fired up my outside blog to launch my Ulster County Real Estate Blog.  The ActiveRain crew did a great job on the integration.  One or two clicks, and my outside blog was cranked up.  I uploaded two pictures and applied a domain name UlsterCountyRealEstateBlog.com (obviously) and bam!  I was alive with a brand spanking new blog already filled up with all my posts from AR.

I am curious to see how the new outside blog will fare in the search engines.  Yes blogs are syndicated by nature and aren't as susceptible to duplicate content penalties (which is a lot different than you might think) but now my posts made in AR live in three places, activerain.com/blogs/loudog, localism.com/agents/loudog and now UlsterCountyRealEstateBlog.com.  In terms of SEO, having the custom domain name is definitely going to help, but if the domain name is new (UlsterCountyRealEstateBlog.com is about a year old), it won't carry the same authority as the AR blog you are currently using because of the age.  We will have to wait and see how these new outside blogs rank.

If you need help setting up your outside blog, Brad Andersohn posted a real good how to blog over at Active Brad.