Above: landing page for "switch to Posterous" campaign.
Real estate blogging has changed
Real estate blog platform ActiveRain.com began as a vibrant free blogging community, but commenced to charging for various features years after its founding. They experienced a shift in culture over the year, but in 2010 went back on promises never to charge founding users, infuriating many of the very people that helped evangelize the community to grow to where it was.
Perhaps seeing a growing weak point, free blogging platform Posterous.com made it free and easy to import an ActiveRain (AR) blog, so many switched and took to blogging on Posterous rather than pay for AR or stick around for future changes. We polled our readers, a majority of which supported users switching.
Posterous notes continued growth
Posterous’ Caroline Hacker said, “Active Rain switchers are among our most active in terms of their usage after switching. Agents seems to particularly like the ease of updating their site via email, the ability to update their Facebook and Twitter accounts with one email and the convenience of adding multiple photos or videos through our Android and iPhone apps.”
Regarding Posterous’ real estate vertical, Hacker noted, “Organically, outside of the switching, real estate is a strong vertical for Posterous with 50% growth since the beginning of this year in new site sign-ups.”
To open an account with Active Rain, click here OR
to export an Active Rain account to Posterous, click here.
jay Great Falls
March 26, 2011 at 9:11 am
Would somebody post a link to a posterous real estate site. I’d like to see their capabilities. I assume one can manipulate h1 h2 etc. throuhg a wysiwyg type platform. Or do you have to use html directly for it.
the big plus of AR is being able to post regularly to localism (city or neighborhood) and the links from it might have more authority than from typical backlinking pages . I do not that localism’s city state real estate shows up in a lot of google searches. So if you post regularly at top of AR’s city pages you are getting a freebie into top rankings in addition to your own site hopefully being ranked.
j
Ken Montville
March 27, 2011 at 12:53 pm
Hooooo-ray!
I haven’t posted on AR for a long time in favor of my own, self-hosted, blog but I was amazed at how quickly AR wanted to charge for various levels of participation and they way insinuated their corporate partners into the platform.
It’s nice to see Posterous step up to attract real estate bloggers.
stephanie crawford
March 27, 2011 at 9:35 pm
I tried AR back in the day, but never really caught on to whole the mini-comments thing. I use WordPress as my main blog, but I also have two supplemental sub-domains routed to Posterous blogs. I have a document & media blog where I house all my “stuff” in the cloud (blank contracts, marketing pieces, listing presentations, interesting PDFs, etc.) example: https://media.stephaniecrawford.net/
As well as a local photo blog (which I need to update more often). I’m really impressed with the Posterous format. It really is no-brainer blogging. And I’ve been quite impressed with the built-in SEO.
One thing I’ve noticed – and it may only be the template I’ve chosen – is that titles aren’t linked out on the main page. On the home page, there may be 10 or 15 full articles, but but you can’t click on the title and have it break out or open in a new window as a single article. You can type the name of the article at the end of a URL in order to break it out, but this is definitely a flaw in the system. Has anyone else noticed this?