A little encouragement goes a long way . . .

Since I've been writing this blog for over 2 and a half years now, I've gotten lots of great feedback. Some of it has been encouragement towards my goals, some just saying "Hey, I enjoyed your post today". I think I actually like the attention. You'll see on the right hand side of the blog, recent entries on my professional blog at Hurlbuthomes.com. There I pontificate about all things real estate and community related. I occasionally get nice comments there too. But I blog somewhere else too . . . yes folks, I have three blogs. I'm a blogomaniac. I subscribe to a Real Estate community called Active Rain (http://www.activerain.com/) It's kind of like MySpace, but for Realtors, lenders, title reps, staging pros, home tour people, etc. If you're in the biz, it's a GREAT spot to go and learn all manner of things real estate related. I like giving back to my professional community, so anything I have something weird or unique happen on a transaction, I blog about it there. Now, AR also has a points system. The more points you have, the higher ranked you are in your town, county and state. These points spill over into AR's public site called Localism (http://localism.com). So if someone were searching for say a real estate agent in Puyallup for example on Localism, they would see my bright and shining face as the Featured agent in Puyallup as I have the most points of anyone in Puyallup. I'd show up as #3 i n Pierce County and #63 in Washington. The more you blog, the more points you get, etc.

One thing that's REALLY cool to me is that if enough people like what you write, you can get recommended to be "Featured". Then your blog post gets posted on the front page of Active Rain, more people see it, more people comment on it, and you get more points. A typical blog post is worth 200 points, and Featured posts can garner up to 450 points. Well yesterday I wrote an article that ended up as my THIRD featured post. I never write anything there with the intent of getting it featured. I just write about what happened, what I did to solve the situation and leave it at that. I honestly don't think about it after that. Until I see my mailbox streaming in with Active Rain comments. Then I find out I got Featured . . . There is just something about having a peer reviewed article getting noticed and appreciated that just makes me glow. It's really kind of cool when people in your profession stand up and take notice and appreciate what you've written. You kind of have that "I have arrived" feeling. Like "Yeah, that's right, I DO know what I'm doing and I am a bad ass!" Or something like that.

So with all of this encouragement, I've decided to write a book. I'm going to leave my comment at that. Just know that I'm writing a book. I have about 12 pages down on paper now. My intent is to write about 100 pages and see what happens from there. I won't tell you about the subject matter, so don't ask. Right now it's a very private thing. It's something I've always wanted to do. I don't honestly know if it'll ever see the light of day, but I'm writing it none the less. We'll see what happens . . . .