600,000 Points – What a Long, Strange an Amazing Trip It’s Been

I realized that I just hit 600,000 points here in the Rain and that led me to pondering the experiences that have brought me to this point.

This is not a point I would have ever believed I would reach when I started here; I had an extremely slow start.  It wasn’t even a crawl.  I joined AR back in May 2007 and manage to do almost nothing other than create a profile.  I then came back in September of 2007 and managed to comment on a whole 8 posts.  Then I disappeared again until May of 2008.  So, in the first year on AR , I managed to read less than a dozen posts and didn’t write my first post until 2 days before my first anniversary.  At that time, I still couldn’t imagine having even 10,000 points.  The top person in Costa Mesa had 13,000, and I thought that had to be nearly unattainable.

So, what changed?  Fortunately for me, Dustin Luther and Jim Marks had a seminar that I attended that month, and Dustin managed to convince me that I needed to start spending a whole lot more time blogging and working on social networking.  He insisted that I needed to get active in the Rain.  And, did I ever, and what a difference it has made both to my business and my life in the past 2 and 1/2 years.

When I finally became active on AR, the real estate market had tumbled, the economy was crumbling, I had just had another child, and my business was in jeopardy.  The old methods of attracting business seemed to no longer work and many potential buyers and sellers were frozen from fear of what was happening in the market.

Fortunately for me, the members here on AR taught me a huge amount in a very short time.  I learned about SEO and SEM and YEO.  I learned how to do market reports from Debe Maxwell and started to do tech meetings locally with Sharon Paxson, and I’ve started to create videos with Rob Magnotta. 

But this is only the start of what AR has helped me to do.  Like many in the real estate industry at that time, I found that I was struggling and trying to decide if I should stay in business.  Now, I get leads and inquiries consistently from the internet and from my blogging.  It has showed me a new way to do business and to indulge myself in writing.

I have recreated my business, and as a bonus have made some amazing friends.  I talk with Billie Hillier almost daily, look forward to my chats with Debe Maxwell and can’t wait to meet her in person next week, and have been fortunate enough to have a good local friend in Sharon Paxson.  I’ve been able to travel to meet Todd Clark in person who turned me on to the wild animal park where my family got to pet lions and tigers – oh my (sorry, couldn’t resist). 

I’ve been to visit Kerrie and Jonathan and Doug and Bob at AR HQ in Seattle where I was lucky enough to meet Pat Kennedy.

There is so much more, but part of what I have learned on AR is that most people prefer not to read a wall of words and that pithy is often received better than verbose.

So, I will simply say that it has been a wonderfully strange trip, and I look forward to the next milestone.