OK, I am going to share some secrets with the members of this group.  This blog post is only to the members of this team and not to the ActiveRain community.  This post also will not appear on my blog and also will not earn me an points.  Maybe it will earn me your friendship and support on ActiveRain.

I noticed there are several others in this group who have also earned a substantial number of points.  I would hope they will also share with us by posting only to this group.

I participated in Karen George's "Great Experiment" on SEO and increasing your position on Google.  There are two other members of this group who also participated.  We all learned a lot and Karen is a great teacher.  See her blog to read about this and get involved when she does it again.  I will cover SEO and how we as a group can participate in a later group post.  If the other two participants want to post about it to this group only, please do.

The subject today is just on ActiveRain points.  The point game can seem a little bit trite, however it is what moves us up in our city or town, county, and state on both ActiveRain and Localism.  Prospects usually pick the top agents, so this is all about increasing our business.  The points are just the medium to achieve this.

My current status is 64,931 points.  I am #1 in Huntington Beach, #1 in Orange County, and #10 in the highly competitive market of California with Jeff Turner and others I am sure you know.

I joined ActiveRain on an invite from someone I do not know on December 9, 2006.  I put in my personal profile information and like several new members went to sleep.  I got active with some blogs in January 2007 and only posted one in Feburary. I really only started getting active on ActiveRain in March of this year.  That is why I created this group.  Thus most of what I have done is in two and a half months.

Before I go into suggestions on what you should do, let me give you my statistics.

1558 points for profile.

2011 points for invites.

35,697 points for posting 163 blogs.

8200 points for commenting on others blogs.

5800 points for linking my websites.

11,665 points for other (5225 for pictures to localism; 6290 for listing neighborhoods to the cities where I work, 50 points for first looking at my point summary, and 100 points for first sending in an email to ActiveRain about a problem or suggestion.

Now what can you do.

First the profile.  I do not know how they evaluate the points (maybe someone else can comment) and the amount is small.  But the profile is important for SEO.  Make sure all your cities are includes and the primary neighborhoods are included.  Also include any keywords you think are important to your business.  You can look at mine.  I have not dressed it up yet for consumers, but it has all the relavant SEO information and comes up in the front page of Google for all the neighborhoods I have listed.

Second the invites.  Unless you know service providers or others that are not competing with you in your region, forget about this.  I am a e-PRO and a menber of the Women's Council of Realtors, so I invited out of state Realtors, with little success.  Eight responded, and of them only one is active and earned me nearly half of the points I got this way.  Obviously you do not wnat to invite people in your city, town or county because they may compete with you for the coveted #1 spot that will earn you new business.  points are insignificant so why go to the effort.

Third blogs.  The big daddy of them all.  You can post up to 10 blogs a week and earn 200 points each.  That is 2000 points a week.  You also earn bonus points for traffic, comments, and featured listings.  Traffic and comments are keys so make sure you have a catchy title and solicit comments in your blog by asking questions.  I too need to work on this, however many of my posts are to localism and the public so the titles are just descriptive. Don't worry about featured listing.  The points are minimal and it is more of an ego thing.  The moderators on AR all have their favorites.  Although I did get 3 featured posts on ActiveRain and 2 on Localism out of 163 posts.  Posta about your area and market conditions to Localism are key.  This is what the public sees and could lead to new prospects. If you have posts to Localism please join the Posts to Localism Group and submit them here for AR members to comment on them.

Get involved with your favorite hobby.  Mine is amateur photography so I have done a lot in the Photography group and have also created the Photoshop Elements Group.  If you do not see a hobby group on AR create one.  Just do a group search with key words first since there are so many duplicate groups.  Don't create groups for points, you get none.

Fourth, comment!  I just got wise to this.  You can comment on up to 10 posts a day and earn 25 points for every comment.  That is 1750 points in a week, nearly what you get for your own posts.  You can see that I have not done this as much as I should do.  I am generally doing better now.

Fifth link your websites to ActiveRain.  I have several websites so I got a fair number of points.  But if you have one or two add a link to them.  You can always get a free website on Point2Homes.com

Last promote your area of business on localism.  You earn points for listing new neighborhoods on Localism and for sdding pictures of your area.

I know this has been long, but hopefully you have learned some good tips.

Now in return when you see a blog from one of our members make a comment.  It moves that blog up on the charts and allows others to see it and comment.  This is what gets us the bonus points and you the extra 25 points.

I will talk about SEO later.

Have fun and I hope this helps our groups members.

Mike