Active Rain

You all likely know we recommend that your own website should be the hub of your online efforts, and that you should spend the majority of the time you spend writing content writing content on YOUR DOMAIN. Not someone else’s.

ActiveRain, which is a popular blogging platform for real estate professionals, is not an environment you control. But of course, there are benefits to writing on another platform with a built in audience – you are just sacrificing some of the long term benefit of content creation for the short term benefits of a built in audience. For more reading on this issue, head over the Phoenix Real Estate Guy and read Jay Thompson’s post.

However, there is an inbetween ground for those who REALLY want to just keep contributing to ActiveRain and still build content on your own domain name at the same time. You can use the FeedWordPress plugin to automatically pull in your Active Rain posts to your own WordPress.org blog. I personally implemented this approach on Spencer Rascoff’s blog (he’s the CEO of Zillow, my former employer). The steps to doing so are pretty simple:

1. Install the FeedWordPress plugin and activate it
2. Grab your ActiveRain RSS feed (for example, mine is feed://drewmeyers.activerain.com/rss)
3. Navigate to your FeedWordPress settings, and add your RSS feed as a new syndication source.
4. You’ll end up with posts like this that get automatically created whenever you publish new posts on ActiveRain.

One of downsides to this approach is that photos still sit on ActiveRain servers – so there’s always the potential that you’ll lose them all if ActiveRain decides to not let people export images. Of course, it’s also duplicate content, so you’re not going to get credit for unique content on your domain (which is one of the primary ways to attract organic SEO traffic). Questions? Leave them in the comments.

If you just want to export all your content instead and start devoting the majority of your time to writing on your own website? Let us know, we can help. And if you need a WordPress website/blog, of course we can help with that too.