By: Julia Aidan
Submitted: 2009-08-11 05:20:21 | Word Count: 417
Active Rain is a great place to blog for free. It was created with the real estate agent in mind. Giving us a place to build an online community. I have learned a lot from talking to the agents on Active Rain, reading their blogs and trying their ideas.
Active Rain carries a lot of authority with Google and the search engines so when you post something on Active Rain it gets crawled very quickly. I have even seen my posts appear in the search engines in as little as 15 minutes. Google just loves Active Rain.
[ advertisement ]
I would not make this my main blog however, I would have a separate blog that I have control over and leverage the power of Active Rain. If I want to talk about something that is specific to the industry of real estate that agents would be interested in but not buyers and sellers then I post on Active Rain. If I am blogging about something that buyers and sellers are going to be interested in then I write the main blog post on my own blog and then go over to Active Rain. I write a teaser post on the Active Rain blog and link back to my own blog.
This does a couple of things. First, since Google loves Active Rain it will get crawled almost immediately so your teaser post will show up in the search engines very fast. Second, it will give you a very good back link to your own blog.
The free services are great but always keep in the back of your mind they can change the rules whenever they want. Don't spend months and years building up a blog somewhere that you do not have control over. If they decided to start charging all of a sudden and the price point was out of your budget or they sell the company and the service goes down the tubes your online business goes with it. You just can't afford to take that chance. Your main blog should always be something you host on a hosting service you choose and have total control of. If you don't do this you are risking your real estate business.
