Back when we were discussing putting a blog together for the Arkansas Realtors® Association (ARA), one question popped up from time to time — “Why don’t we host the blog ourselves?”

Some thought was given to hosting a blog on our ARA site, but we tried that once and it didn’t go over to well for want of traffic. That, folks, was the primary reason for making the decision to go with Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP) — a growing real estate community that has spent the past few months helping people who make a living through real estate (agents, mortgage bankers, etc.) set up blogs and drive traffic to them.

Our little ARA blog opened about halfway through Monday and I feel compelled to share some traffic counts. From Monday through Friday, 1,866 unique visitors visited The Arkansas Realtor and we’ve recorded an average bounce rate of 18.98 percent.

Let me explain what all that means. The unique visitors count represents individual visits. If someone visited the site 30 times in the same day, only one visit would be recorded. So, 1,866 indviduals have made it to our blog over the past few days. That’s impressive and that 18.98 percent bounce rate is outstanding.

A high bounce rate, see, would mean that people are looking at the blog then quickly moving on to something else. If you have a low bounce rate, that means that people are sticking around and reading the content posted. A bounce rate below 40 percent is considered fantastic, I’m told, and this blog whips the socks off of that. Hopefully, that will continue.

What PREP has done for us is not only drive traffic to our site through social networking, but help get traffic that is meaningful. The PREP folks have found ways to get people here who can use the information we post. We don’t have to worry about promoting articles through Digg, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, etc. because the folks at PREP take care of that for us.

Of course, I am impressed at how excited our ARA members are about the blog and know that a lot of them have visited, too. The support from Arkansas Realtors is always appreciated and, in fact, we at the ARA wouldn’t be pursuing this project if we didn’t think it would benefit our members.

We’ve had some great traffic in our first week and I hope to see that continue. Maintaining a blog takes a lot of work and it’s wasted effort unless people visited. PREP has helped us get that quality traffic for a shockingly low price. Thanks, PREP!

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