The last six months have been terrible for my business. After 10 profitable years of being in business, my company had it's first year ever where we ended up in the red. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that from about October on, real estate sucked for me!
After doing a bunch of soul searching I decided in January to pick up the pieces, trim some dead wood and refocus on building my business. I took a hard and honest look at what we were doing good and what we were doing bad at. One of the things that I had not done so well at was building my website and internet presence.
Upon review I came to the conclusion that while a lot of the traditional methods of marketing a real estate and mortgage company still worked, a lot of them were not working as well. Something had changed.
I came to the conclusion that while the internet had been building as a force in real estate for some time, that it was now reaching a certain critical mass. To be successful I was going to have to utilize my website as more than just an electronic brochure.
I'm sure that a lot of you will feel my pain here when I say, "Where the hell do you start on this whole internet thing?" I started by reading quite a bit. Which in it's own right is confusing on this issue. One article tells you that links are the key, while another article tells you that content is the key. On top of everything else, the rules of the game change and nobody tells anyone that they are changing. You've simply got to keep up.
In my research I came across Activerain and some other blogging sites and realized what a wealth of information and insight they were. I also realized that they are an effective tool in building your internet presence. So, I went to work. I started reading a lot of the posts and the comments that people left. I got into some fairly intense conversations with people. It became evident to me that while there are some really off the wall people in here who post some pretty off the wall stuff, that almost everyone on here is pretty "with it" to an amazing degree.
Activerain and to a lesser extent some of the other blogging sites that I have visited has led me to rediscover something that I had lost in my 22 years in real estate and mortgages. A sense of community. The sense that it wasn't all about just making a buck. That people out there are genuinely willing and even eager to be helpful to one another. I can't tell you all just how cool this is to me!
The day before yesterday my son, who goes to college at Auburn University in Auburn Alabama, called me and told
me that the clutch is going out on his truck and that he didn't know what to do about it. Well, before I would have told him to try his best to find a decent shop, take it there and to tell me how much he was going to need for the repair. Well, like I mentioned above, the last six months haven't been all that great. So, just leaving it to chance that my son would find a shop that would do a good job at a reasonable price wasn't really a choice for me.
I thought about my options for a bit, then hopped on Activerain and did a search for agents 
in Auburn, Alabama and I found Laura Sellers . I dropped Laura an email and she got back to me asking what it was that my son needed. I wrote her back, she checked around and referred us to a shop in Opelika (the town next to Auburn).
Even though I live over 600 miles away from her, Laura went out of her way and expended effort to help my son and I out. It might just be a southern thing, or an Alabama thing or maybe she's just a nice person who I stumbled across. It might be all of those things, but one thing that I'm for sure of is that it's an Activerain thing!
Thank you Laura and thank all of you who participate to make Activerain a community.
WAR EAGLE!
R.B. "Bob" Mitchell
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