I have had my own business blog site for the better part of five years. When I first signed up to have my own custom blogsite built, I was still pretty new to ActiveRain but knew I would want to continue with the experience of blogging about real estate, my community and provide regular local real estate market reports.
Being a neophyte to blogging, I was never really sure that I would make a difference in my business but others assured me I would never regret the time or the resources to build the site out and advantage myself as a local expert with a strong internet presence..
I had for years various static websites where content was rarely changed or added to only seldom and this seemed to make sense that bringing my experience to bear in the market place would be an idea that would put me out ahead of many others in the real estate business in may area.
The custom blogsite was built and came on line and I was generating a lot of activity from other real estate bloggers. I soon learned though that relying on your host to make your blogsite significant may not always be the best way forward, especially if they are concentrating on building their business while you are trying to build yours.
I soon lost interest as my site was proving not to be as functional as I had originally hoped and the design of it limited what could be done with it. I re-focused my energies with ActiveRain and only occasionally added anything to my own site. It did have an IDX service link and that kept it of interest to those that would go to it.
Recently I started to think about this again and wondered why I have relied solely on one site like ActiveRain when I should have also kept up the other site to keep it as vital as I could with at least good and current information. I just couldn't get over the idea that the site that cost thousands of dollars to build was not what I wanted. I had spoken to a number of professionals in website design and they said it would cost more to repair the site to make it function they way I think it should than it would be to start over and create a new and more vital site. That was not the answer I had hoped for and I just let it go out of my consciousness.
The only thing I had going with the site was that the domain was now significantly aged and is valuable because of the way the Google Algorithms work in recognizing aged sites as being stronger and as one would say, "In it to Win it"
A short time ago, I found a great tool that began to change all my thinking on the subject. It was a bookazine ( a book in magazine format) called "WordPress for Beginners" that I purchased from Costco. WordPress also has a similar on line course. Check out the link.
I wish I had seen something like this that would have helped me better understand how simple creating sites and making them useful to enhance our online presence. While using WordPress to add posts and publish them is not complex, recognizing and using the needed plug-ins and understanding their use and some of the other advanced features take a bit of focus to learn.
In real estate we build our business and if we are lucky we stay very busy with real estate and with all the new technologies to keep us busy learning, being at least somewhat active in social media, etc, it just didn't seen like I was ever going to learn this aspect of my blog.
That brings me to this point. If you want your own blog and want to build one yourself, this bookazine will walk through with support CD tutorials that comes with it and I am undertaking this learning process now. It is going to take a while but with this new tool, I feel confident that by making the learning of building my own new blogsite a goal, I can get this accomplished.
In the process, there are things here in this training manual that as I learn and build out the new site, I can share here on ActiveRain. I will give thought about how I can do that perhaps by finding some tutorials found on YouTube that I can add to give a more robust understanding of the process.
At the very least I will learn how to relate what I think would be the best in an outside webblog that I can get enthusiastic about. I'll keep you updated on my progress.
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