Before I get to deep in this post, let me first say that I could never sit here and individually thank the 174 people that subscribe to me, the 15 people that I have invited and accepted that invitation to join ActiveRain, the 128 associates that I have, or the countless others that have had a direct or maybe an indirect influence on my life and my blogging career. Please do not feel left out if you are not mentioned in this post. You all are special to me, some more than others (just kidding), and I do not know what I would do without each and everyone of you. All in all, I would not be where I am today if it were not for all of you. Before we dive in, here is a song that actually inspired this very post.
I joined Active Rain back in September of 2007. It was the middle of the month and the invitation actually came from a loan officer that had worked for me in Florida. When I joined, I never really knew where it was going to take 
me and I never really knew how I would do. With that said, I took my first steps into the great wide open.
My first few weeks were really spent trying to find my way around. Since I am very computer literate, it was not a difficult task for me to figure out what blogging was all about. Soon I was up and running and spreading my wings. While I was beginning to blossom in ActiveRain, it was getting harder and harder to find loans, especially for a branch manager who had not solicited a loan application in almost 5 years.
That was when I caught my first break. I got a call from Brande Bradford of Bradford Realty Group. Brande sent me my first referral ever from Active Rain and I am still much appreciative of the business that she sends to the Thornton Team. Since that time, Rich Dansereau and her have continued the relationship between her and the Thornton Team. As I would grow in Active Rain, I would make many friends. Heck, I even made one adversary. That was not by design and it is water under the bridge.
It did not take me long to start marking my mark in the Rain through. I started groups such as Baseball Talk 101, Fantasy Sports 101, and The Movie Club. These groups would take off better than what I would have expected for them to do.
It was not long after starting to blog here that I got into writing in Hubpages and eHow. Since that time, I have scaled back on how much I write in both of these platforms. That is mainly due to the success that I have had in writing on my sports blog. I created SportsFanatic back in March of 2008 for the sole principle of writing a sports blog that would pay me some pocket change. Eventually, this sports blog would lead to my first real stand alone blog site. In July, Rich Dansereau gave birth to a dream that I had for a year. He named Athletic Alley and together we built the site. It did not take long for this site to catch on. Before we knew it, we were having more than 500 average unique visitors a day reading articles written by us and other sports enthusiasts that were on the site.
In October, my brain child of Positive Real Estate Professionals, or as we affectionately call it, PREP, was launched. This might be the fastest growing website that he have ventured into. The month of October was only a few days and still say 400 + unique visitors. November seemed to be better to us as the unique hits almost reached 1,500. December once again saw an increase in unique visitors as we managed to more than double the visitors by bring 3,601 to the site. However, that was not even the shining moment for us. That came when Google issue it's first page ranking by giving us a PR2 just 2 months out the gate. Alexa responded in kind by also giving us a ranking in December of just under 200,000. But, that is where the fun just began. This month we have managed to maintain an average of more than 300 unique visitors a day. We have pushed the Alexa ranking down to 119,802 at the current position. All indications show that our Alexa ranking will continue to drop and get better as the new rankings come out. On top of it, the Google Page Ranking looks as though it too should raise when the new rankings are released. Bottom line to this site though is the fact that we have pushed more viewers off to the vendors personal sites. This in turn gives them more potential customers for them.
The latest endeavor into the great wide open would be that of R & D Art. This site was created so that we could help service a few websites that we had built for friends. We decided that there was enough interest to put it forth as its own business and started promoting it. We 
have built such sites as Athletic Alley, Positive Real Estate Professionals, Eugene Loan Guy, Oregon Real Estate Queen, and UpState SC Today. Two of these sites we own, two of them we maintain and services, and the last one has actually advanced on her own. Robin Green is the author and owner to UpState SC Today and also has a new site called Dirt Track Gone Wild that she was able to build on her own with some coaching from me. The newest edition to R & D Art has to be the classes and products that we are now offering. I think that in the long run, these are going to shorten the time that it takes people to get up and running.
I want to once again thank all the people that read, comment, reblog, and subscribe to my blog here on Active Rain. Without you, this blog does not exist. All in all, the biggest reason that I wrote this is to say this; the sky is the limit and that limit can not be reached when you limit yourself.
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