Welcome to our first Active Rain Stars! Here are the real deal interviews with your favorite bloggers.
All the burning questions inquiring minds want to know are now discovered.
It was a long flight from West Palm Beach Florida to Beaverton Oregon. I made my way through with my camera and my ISPY kit as I am really a covert operator on a mission to discover all the secrets of Todd Clark, master blogger on Active Rain weighing in at 686,583 points! He has the second highest points in all of Active Rain.
Going deep under cover I stalked Todd while he was showing homes to some buyers. It seems after some snooping around the Beaverton area neighborhoods that Todd loves to work with first time home buyers. What do all these buyers have to say about Todd? They like to do business with someone they like and trust. Todd is just one of the dads in the neighborhood; involved and approachable.
He goes the extra mile for his clients yet never sacrificing his family time. He has rarely missed any of his children's events. First time home buyer families are attracted to Todd through his blog because he writes about things that they are interested in as well as a transparency that has been yielding results for Todd. The buyers and sellers that call Todd because of reading his blog do not even interview him for the job. It is a given that he has the listing or the buyer. This is because of the bond between the client and Todd that was developed through the prospect reading Todd's blog which is not only informative and filled with great real estate information but is also a testament to who he is a a person and as a father. His transparency builds the relationship and does the interview for him.
My investigative reporting turned up some interesting details about the Todd's history on Active Rain. He actually stumbled upon Active Rain by accident.Through records that I was able to obtain I discovered that Todd first started blogging on Point 2 in more of a forum style, then he moved over to Blogger. He was not really happy with the Blogger platform so Todd began to search for a blogging platform that would be a good fit for him. He was already a client of ResPres' real estate shows and after a few days on Active Rain he saw that Jeff Turner was blogging on Active Rain. Todd said to himself that this was the place he should be.
So off to Seattle I was headed to find out more about Todd's beginnings on Active Rain. I arrived at the new Active Rain headquarters in Seattle and was greeted by Bob Stewart. I was interested in the archived records of Todd Clark. I soon discovered after some digging around that Todd started on Active Rain on January 3, 2007 when there were just 15,000 members on Active Rain. He has 55 featured posts and over 670,000 points. He has written 1397 posts. When Todd started blogging on Active Rain it only took him about a month to get to the top of his state. He blogged for about 3 months and when that did not make his phone ring with buyers and sellers he basically stopped blogging.
Then one day a couple of months later Todd's phone rang and it was a buyer who was reading his Active Rain blog, they became his clients and he was hooked on blogging from that point forward. When he arrived back at Active Rain he discovered that he was now the low man on the totem pole. There were many bloggers by this time and most were ahead of him in his state. The records show that Todd became very active blogging on Active Rain in June and July of 2007. It appears that Todd began blogging daily, making sure he got one post a day on his Active Rain blog until December.
In October of 2007 he got his second buyer from his Active Rain blog which propelled him into making the decision to hit the blogging heavily. So starting in December he started to write 2 posts per day. In December of 2007 he produced a very effective slide show of the Christmas lights throughout the neighborhoods. He then added the neighborhood marketing stats to the posts. This started bringing in the business for Todd.
I got on a plane and decided it was time to meet this Todd guy and find out what the secret to his success on Active Rain was and maybe I would be able to even get some words to the wise from him before heading back home. I found Todd at one of his children's softball games. Todd coaching every softball season and is very involved with his kids' teams. All his clients know that he is unavailable on weeknights during softball games and practices. Todd's integrity and love of his family are real attractors to families who are looking for a home to buy or sell. Todd's father had only missed three of Todd's childhood events. While he was so glad his father was always there for him he did notice that there were kids in the same events who in seven years Todd never saw one of their parents at an event. This really made Todd realize how important it was for a father to be there for his children and he wanted to be like his dad. If you read his blog than you know about his wonderful relationship with his father. He wants to be like his dad.
Now of course, we can't complete the interview and report without getting the juicy personal details and his best kept secrets. Todd and his wife are celebrating their 17th year wedding anniversary on July 3rd. In today's society that is not commonplace and it shows that the Clarks place a high importance on Family. Congrats to Todd and his wife, Samantha for being married to the same and only person for this time and we look forward to the silver and gold anniversaries. They have 3 children together. Here is a post Todd wrote about the woman behind the man, how important Samantha is to him.
One of the secrets to their success which is not readily known is that Todd and his wife homeschool their 3 children. This is how Todd and I first connected on Active Rain. In fact, I was commenting on Jason Crouch's posts about homeschool and we were connecting with other Active Rainers that home schooled also. Jason told me about Todd and he also told Todd about us. That is how Todd and I met on Active Rain. Homeschool is one of my near and dear passions and causes and being able to connect with others of the same mindset is really empowering.
I was walking away after the game and noticed Todd in his car looking like he was talking to himself. As I got a little closer I discovered that Todd was using a voice recorder to draft his posts for his blog. Oh, so that is how he is able to draft like 18 posts in one day! I always wondered how he was able to get all those posts written and published and still work with sellers and buyers. He speaks 4 to 5 posts while driving to and from appointments. He has discovered that every time one of his clients asks a question he should write a post about that question because there are at least 10 other people with the same question but did not ask. People don't want to appear stupid by asking a question they may feel they should know the answer to. The only stupid question is the one that does not get asked.
What is his record of recording his posts? He cranked out 18 of those posts in ONE DAY! He has 54 posts already prewritten and ready to publish on Active Rain. Todd uploads his posts from his recorder direct into word document, he then transfers the post to Nvu and then moves them over to Active Rain and publishes the posts there on Active Rain. He uses Dragon Naturally Speaking for the software translator.
The biggest secret of all is that Todd's wife does the editing of his posts. She edits all of his work for him. Todd's wife editing his posts is Todd's best kept secret. But now you know!
Words of Advice from Todd to the newbies:
- Just write your first post.
- Don't worry about what it looks like or if you know how to fancy it up.
- Just do it!
Words of Advice from Todd to the Active Rain veterans:
- Don't be scared or focus on what other people may think of you, it is not about that.
- Someone will be attracted to you from somewhere and will connect with you.
- Active Rain is Free, keep on blogging and don't stop.
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Active Rain Star Blogger Interviews- Secrets To Success of The Rich and Famous Bloggers by Katerina Gasset is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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