Do Consumers Even Visit ActiveRain? Oh Yeah! In Spades!
Jon was kind enough to make this available for a re-blog. As I read this I thought about Club Chaos and our team writing projects, the launch of Little Minion TV on Active Rain and the direction we want to take with The Outside Blog Minion Report and our developing Team Blog.
There are so many opportunities waiting to be explored here at Active Rain. Those numbers are phenomenal and are a direct resut of the collective efforts of over 128,890 professional members working with the Active Rain Real Estate Network. There is something to be said for playing nice in the electronic sand box. The search engines wouldn't drive that much traffic here if it wasn't for the content of our blog posts. I got an e-mail from Autralia the same day I posted my kid's little video on Shea Stadium and Citi Field. I'm very happy to report that it's going viral on the Internet. I can't wait to see what happens when I post Stephen the Minion Blur at the Uni-sphere. :-)
My advice: create more original content and be very careful how you decide to brand your name and develop your (a) blogs, (b) trade marks and (c) service marks. You and your creations are very valuable to the community and this wonderful network. Market reports are not the only reason a person will decide to pick up the phone and call you.
Do not squander your social media opportunities. Blogging is a significant part of my business plan and if you just made a profile but don't spend any time here, you need to think again. The next time someone tells you (a) I don't have time for that or (b) you are wasting your time creating blog posts, send them over to read what Jon has to say on the subject. Show them the latest analytics and statistics. Tell them your friend Carolyn was out of the office yesterday and had 19 messages come in about making potential business arrangements, inclusive of four referrals from Active Rainers. How did the other 15 find me? My blog.
Because of the Active Rain Real Estate Network I now need a Minion sitter (LOL). Yo - I'm just sayin'... ;-)
I just stumbled upon the comment above that was a part of a post where people were debating the returns on various online real estate websites. I have heard the sentiments of the comment above numerous times since founding ActiveRain. Because of the rich professional-to-professional networking that happens everyday on ActiveRain some people dismiss the great consumer reach of the site. This is likely our fault as we tend not to toot our own horn regarding our accomplishments. As a result we have done a poor job educating the industry as to the power inherent in ActiveRain to connect real estate professionals with consumers.
I track our traffic numbers on a daily basis. It's a borderline obsession for me. When you've built websites your whole adult life, this tends to happen. For example, I know that yesterday was our second highest number of visitors ever to the site. 88% of our visitors on a monthly basis come from search engines or referral from other sites. These are potential clients doing search queries that are leading them to your posts.
But the stat that jumps out at me that lets me know ActiveRain is MUCH MORE than 'primarily a peer-to-peer platform' is this: the number of members on our site is quite a bit less than 10% of our unique visitors per month. That means there are over 9 consumers hitting the site for every one member.........and when you factor in how many of our members are actually contributing content, that number gets even higher.
As I was getting ready to write this post, I did some additional research and found the graph below that compares ActiveRain's traffic with other "big boys" of our industry: ColdwellBanker.com, REMAX.com, Century21.com, and KW.com. It is exciting for me to note that we started off one year ago in 5th place (out of 5) in this group and now we are ranking in 2nd place with almost a 200% yearly growth rate.
Comments(38)