Last week's Localism Land Rush was a resounding success with over 4,000 communities/neighborhoods being sponsored!

But now that all the excitement and hoopla is winding down, several of you have been scratching your heads and wondering,

"What's Next? I've got these communities that I've sponsored, so what do I do now to maximize my sponsorship investment?"

Let me start off by emphasizing the fact that in order to achieve viable, lasting success with your sponsored communities/neighborhoods, you'll need to do more than simply pay your monthly fees. Unfortunately, there's bound to be those who will attempt to shortcut the process, throw up a hasty description, a few links, and call it a day.

The purpose of this series will be to provide helpful instruction on how to best populate your sponsored community page, how to achieve the maximum results on your sponsorship, and to share creative ideas and best practices among ActiveRain members.

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Okay, so the Official ActiveRain Poster Child, Brad Andersohn, unintentionally stole my thunder with his recent post, Localism - The Next Steps.

I think that his post would be an excellent starting point for our task here, so hop over to his article first before you proceed any further.

As usual, Brad does a great job of taking you through the steps of getting started. Eventually, you'll land at this screen:

Today, I want us to focus on generating a good neighborhood/community description. Take your time with this because this is content that will remain intact until you elect to discontinue your sponsorship. In some respects, this description will serve to make an important 'first impression' for consumers who are accessing your community page. Don't simply get caught up in reciting cold statistical data about your community, but bring it to life through your words. Brad's post offers several examples of well-written descriptions. I particularly like Roberta Murphy's description of La Jolla, and Georgina Hunter's tempting taste of Kihei. You can also access one of my sponsored pages, Silverdale WA. I think that mine is probably a bit wordy at this point, so I'll try to pare it down some. Also note, DO NOT use HTML code for this section.

Next, you'll want to input your choice of three links and titles. Only one of them can be commercially related to YOUR business. For most of you, this will probably be your real estate website. The two other links can be sites from within your community, either businesses or non-profits. For my Silverdale WA page, I chose our local community theater where I currently serve as a Board Member, and the blogsite for our local newspaper, the Kitsap Sun. In the future, I will be alternating these with websites of local area businesses and non-profit organizations. Once you've inputted these links, go back to your community page and verify that the links are working properly.

I think it would be fun to see some of the finished community descriptions that you guys create. So be sure to put a link to your sponsored community page in the comments section of this post when you get it completed, and we can read your masterpiece!

There will be a number of additional helpful elements and strategies that we'll be sharing that you can implement in effectively developing your sponsored community, so Stay Tuned!

(P.S. If you're a Twitter Bug, be sure to follow the new Localism Tweet!)