The Best ActiveRain Outside Blog Ever | Introducing Active Rain's Outside Blogs

Joe I have a love/hate relationship with Active Rain.  I love that the posts index quickly and I enjoy interacting with the community there, but just don't have a strong sense of trust due to corporate ownership.

I have gotten real business from clients through Active Rain I believe because I am the top spot for my city and I will continue to participate and post there but I just do it cautiously.

Thanks Carolyn.  I can understand your concern.  I too have some concerns, but overall I've been pleased with the blogging results and certainly thrilled about new relationships found.  Btw, I just updated the original blog entry with a Squidoo lens I'm working on today that focuses on Colleen's blog specifically, and ActiveRain in general.  There is a place at the bottom of the lens to add your outside blog url, and/or real estate related link. 

Errmmm isn't this just a bad alternative to a wp blog? (Also free)

I agree, both platforms are free, however, the difference is the hosting.   ActiveRain's is free, but the WordPress free version is a subdomain of WordPress.  

For what it's worth, the free Wordpress can build very strong PR quickly and easily by smartly using the categories and tags.  Just like with the squids.  My WP free has a PR4 which is my best PR.  I am pretty sure that did not come from any other linking than from the high PR WP Category and Tag pages.  The drawback is no plugins and no "do follows" on the comments.  I am playing with a new hosted WP and am anxious to find out if I can build the PR there as easily, I am thinking not.

Sorry, completing the thought here - I am betting that the Active Rain outside blogs may have the same PR building potential as the WP free.  Let us know what you find out.

I was just too confused with the dupe content issue and the idea that I now have to build up my outside blog vs. using the authority of the AR domain for my "inside" blog.  The other day I posted something and before I knew it I got a Google Alert for it.  Would that happen if I now create an outside blog using my own domain?  Am I wrong in thinking that it's like starting my AR blogging efforts from scratch?

Sometimes I'm ready to leave AR so I mainly use it because it gets indexed quickly and it's another way to get anchor text links to my main sites.

Judy, I think any blog with pinging set up properly gets crawled almost immediately.  I am sure that if I am wrong someone will correct me.

Joe - FYI, you can map a unique URL to a free wordpress blog for only $10/year.  So you could still have www.colleenlane.com mapped to a wordpress blog if you're ever dissatisfied with AR.