Blogging for Position

The ActiveRain network is growing at a unprecidented rate and in turn being point competitive for position is creating some healthy competition. But is there a draw back to blogging for points?

ActiveRain's directory organization, country - state - county- city, enables buyer/sellers to find agents in their local area and it makes positioning ever more important. Like search engines, ActiveRain has designed their system to display the best results for a geopgraphical area. But the AR system varies from their search engine/directory counter parts in multiple ways. Allowing users to create profiles, blogs and upload images has give professional easy access to becoming a local expert.

But as blogs are posted, points awarded and positioning changing does it create a blog for points agenda? After breezing the network for awhile I have noticed many blogging styles. Some of which are informative and formal and other that are relaxed and personal.

Blogging for position has become habit and some might even say addictive. The AR system encourages participation, hard work and there has been an evolution in blog scoring that the creators are trying to get a handle on.

In my area, Washington - Snohomish County - Marysville, the competitiveness varies. In the Washington category there are a few big players and a lot of up and comers. People are steadily increasing participation to have great position on a page that has a Google Page Rank 4. I have been in tough competition with Karen for the third position but I haven't been able to stay past her before to long. She usually has more daily updates than I making it hard to keep up, especially with all my other office duties. So we are number 3&4 in WA and number 1&2 in Snohomish County.

Being so competitive with someone in my county makes it hard to increase the WA ranking with out some serious hard work. Right now I am not worried about being number 1 in Snohomish County but isn't near as competitive as the state rankings. In Snohomish County Karen and I have a comfortable lead over the nearest competition which has some great benifits. It will take a lot of work to knock us off our competive position.

My city, Marysville, is a whole different relm. No one is even close to passing me but that is the least of my worries. Right now Barnett Associates has all the positions in Marysville. With 6 people from our office being it makes it easy to own all the best positions. We also have a second place ranking in Lake Stevens which is a neighboring city just to the South East of Marysville.

But to blog just to blog is a way to get points but is it the way to achieve the deired results, more business? Getting used to blogging is the first step and it is great the AR network gives points for people just getting started no matter what the topic of the blog maybe. But I have found a lot of shorts posts earning points in multiple succession. An example is doing 4 posts all consisting of a single paragraph. How much thought actually went into that post? Probably not much.

In my last post, Definition of Marketing, I have tried to incorporate humor, marketing and links to encourage participation. I think it has gone real well and I love the outcome. A few time I almost spit coffee on my computer because of the contributors analgies. I say Blog and blog often...as long as someone is creating a avenue for their own business it can't be a bad thing.

In other news, my ClustrMap has finally updated and links for my blog are coming in from all over the world. I am happy to see that attention is just not located to the United States. Minoring in International Business, I am infactuated with the world politics, business and potential opportunities.

Anyhoo I don't know if I even addressed my original thesis sentence...but ah well. Sometimes the mind wanders while posting.