4:45 a.m.
It's early morning...way too early for me, but I couldn't sleep. So I wandered onto AR to look for new groups to join and found the Active Rain Block Party. I love a good party, so I joined. That's when I spotted the contest about AR success stories. I've never entered a contest on AR before, but I can't pass up an opportunity to sing the praises of AR.
I joined AR this past summer. At the time, I struggled to understand blogging at all...and had honestly never heard of Active Rain until I attended one of our office training classes on websites. I enjoy writing so that side of the blogging equation appealed to me. Little did I know how much I would gain from joining AR.
When we joined AR, we were still paying for Google ad words and not having any luck with the search engines. Sure, we would show up as a sponsored link, but the coveted organic ranking eluded us. In fact, you could do a Google search using our exact domain name and we still wouldn't show up. So I started reading everything I could find on AR about SEO. It was like tapping into a gold mine of information. Information was everywhere...all I had to do was absorb it. There were links to other sites, links to articles about SEO, posts with helpful hints and encouragement. I can truthfully say with no exaggeration, that what I learned about SEO on the Rain transformed our presence on the web in 6 short months. We now show up somewhere in the top three pages of every important search term. And it's not just our website, it's also our Localism and AR blog that show up too. As a result of our Internet presence, we're now actively working with buyers who came to us because they found us on the Internet. And we have a listing that came our way as a referral from another AR member. But the amazing thing is what has happened to our web site traffic. Thanks to the things we've learned on AR, we have shattered all previous traffic records and are now poised to have over 1,000 UNIQUE visitors for the month of December and well over 10,000 pages viewed, and over 54,000 hits...Plus nearly half are bookmarking our site....all this for one month. I have no idea how that compares to anyone eles' website, but for us, it's huge. In January 2008, our site had 150 unique visitors. It all began to change in June, though, when we joined AR. Traffic doubled that month and there's been no looking back. In this day and age, having an Internet presence is a critical part of our business...one that has been greatly enhanced through our time in the rain.
Like most people who "get" Active Rain, I am so grateful for those who have taught me so much. Our growth in our understanding of SEO is only one example. My hope is that I will be always find a way to reciprocate.
UPDATE: At 8:41 a.m. we broke through with our 1,000 unique website visitor for the month!! Waa hoo!
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