30 days of solid Rain - Active life here in the cloud, Saint Cloud that is...

Over the last 30 days Liz and I have had quite an experience here on ActiveRain. Our adventure started out with a simple challenge to post 100 wonderful reasons in 100 days that we love about living in St Cloud which is centrally located in the great state of Minnesota.

Our posts have caused us to reconnect with our community, our friends and make some new ones along the way. This all started off innocently enough with taking a good hard look at our blog and what was being sent out into the world and how appealing, or not, it would be to potential clients. We quickly realized that while showcasing my listings, providing local St Cloud and central Minnesota real estate market data, and linking to my real estate website was all well and good there was not any real reason for someone to choose to come back to our blog verses another St Cloud area real estate person's blog. We decided to correct that immediately and share with everyone nice enough to check out our posts all the wonderful reasons to love St Cloud.

We have now covered 30 different area features, events and groups and are still going strong, everything from the fabulously beautiful and completely restored Paramount Theatre to the Mighty Mississippi River, from Clemens Gardens to the entrepreneurial Spirit that is alive and strong here in St Cloud. Out of sheer curiosity Liz one evening about 8 hours after we posted about the Granite Trio, a large sculpture in downtown, went onto Google to see if we had a placement for the post. She typed in The Granite Trio St Cloud, and WOW! the post we just put up on ActiveRain was number one.

We have also learned some interesting things about our own towns history. In our recent post about James J Hill, for instance, we had no idea that he influenced so many lives in such a positive way. His legacy goes far beyond what our previous understanding of his life had been. We have even, through that post, now made contact with the James J Hill Reference Library and have welcomed them to share some more information on our post about all of their incredible resources.

There are a few posts that we will not be able to do, due to certain rules. We had planned on covering the history of one of our local banks. After reconnecting with one of the people over there who we have not been in touch with for a while, we learned that due to Federal Regulations, because they have insured deposits, they can not participate in any kind of blog posts such as our wonderful reasons series. We were hoping to be able to include them, but we understand and continue to enjoy a now renewed relationship with them.

One last thing - Localism. We are now all over localism for our area and have even created several neighborhoods in and around St Cloud. As we post more, heading towards 100, we will continue to add to this and build upon what we have already done. This is becoming more fun as we go too, now it seems like with each new post there is an opportunity to link back to another post, from the series wonderful reasons to love St Cloud, or 2.