Go for the Gold!

Neal Bloom was gracious enough to sponsor three groups to recognize members who have achieved the 50K, 100K or 200k points milestones.

This is a copy of my "Points Summary" as of today - July 1, 2007.  In this post I'm going to address the "why".

Future posts in this section will focus on the specifics of each "how".  Scroll down past the "Points Summary" for the rest of the narrative.

Activity Details

Score Summary

Profile Points:	1765
Invite Points:	54516
Blogging Points:	74779
Blog Comment Points:	43500
Linking Points:	2400
Bonus Points:	4050
Other Points:	49495

Why?  Why bother doing things to accumulate points? 

I came across Active Rain back in October 2006 - October 4, 2006 to be precise.  I found Active Rain while googling for the term "EcoBroker" and the #1 organic Search Engine Result was an Active Rain Profile for Dena Stevens.  Unfortunately for Dena - I was unaware that signing up with her as my sponsor would give her 10% of my points going forward - something I will forever regret and if the Rain Gods are so inclined I suppose they could "make it so".  (It would be worth it just to get the visual on Dena noticing a 20,000+ point boost!)

I don't know the date Dena signed up for Active Rain - it looks like September 21, 2006 as that is the date of her first Comment and of her first Blog.  That would be just under 2 weeks from joining that she was NUMBER 1 organically in Google for a ONE WORD SEARCH.  That in and of itself should tell you something about the Power of the Rain.

So back to "Why".  Simple.  I have believed for a long time that the web is the place to be found (not the newsprint classifieds) to generate incremental business revenue.  It was apparent that those with higher point totals on Active Rain had more visibility - and therefore one way to bring incremental business to the door was to have high visibility on Active Rain - which meant I had to find a way to generate points - and to end up with as many or more points than others in the Rain.  The "Why" was that simple at the time.  Over time - the vast array of benefits of being a member of Active Rain became apparent - but that's for a different post to this group.

Stay tuned for future posts in this series.....