When I decided it would be fun to acknowledge a newbie blog every week, it seemed like an easy post that I wouldn't have to think up a new idea for.
WRONG!
All week, I've been looking for newbies. With every list of comments on one of my blogs, I'd click on each unfamiliar name with a little prayer, "Please be my newbie! Please be my newbie!"
Here's what I was looking for:
A blogger who's been blogging on Active Rain for two months or less- Someone who regularly posts and who has written at least a couple of posts within the last week
- Posts, at least the recent ones, that look good and use graphics well - either clip art or photos
- Posts that are well written and that, a lot of the time anyway, have a point that has something to do with real estate or the bloggers' market area - nothing like a funny restaurant review to spice up a blog!
- If a site was predominately boiler-plate market reports or ads for listings (especially other agents' - with their permission, I assume), I had to ask "where's the beef?"
- The same applied if the majority of the posts were about 51 words long - or even shorter with a long "contact me" message at the top or bottom - clearly written just for the 200 points.
- A good profile would score points, although most newbies haven't quite figured the profile thing out yet, and I overlooked shortcomings in this area if the rest of the blog worked.
Reading through so many posts reminded me of my painful first couple of months, writing what I thought were fabulous posts that received few comments and no gold stars!
What's a girl have to do to get a gold star anyway? I'll do it! I'll do it!
It was fun seeing a lot of my newbie bloggers go through the same process that I did - learning to use graphics, writing about national as well as local issues, and starting to get comments. And there were a few gold stars in there, too.
So, where did I look for my newbies?
I looked for people commenting on my blogs. I looked for people commenting on other people's blogs. I bookmarked the page of Rainers with 5,000-10,000 points, and flipped forward and backward through those - interesting because so many people hadn't posted anything for a long while. I re-joined the Newbie Group, which has a lot of oldies still posting there.
Clearly, I'm going to have to find a better mechanism for finding blogs. This turned out to be time consuming and probably not real efficient! And I'm sure to have missed some amazing newbie bloggers!
The fun part was finding some really fun blogs written by both newbies and oldies - all that and showing houses, too!
Then, Oh! My! God! My Newbie! There s/he is! Started off with great writing. Recent posts combine great writing and great photography!
So, stay tuned tomorrow for The Great Reveal!
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