I am not familiar with blogs, can someone explain exactly what it is? I am a member of activerain and would like to have my own blog, if I only knew how it works.
Thanks,sorry to sound odd...

A blog is basically your own discussion with the world, a series of dated posts made by you, sort of like an online diary...

Usually when one refers to "blog" they are talking about a blog site. A website where all the content is generated as a series of editorial chronologically ordered posts.

For Active Rain go to "Blogs" and then "Write Blog Post". And you'll be posting to your own blog, which also is a part of a large community blog.

An amazing resource for information about blogs can be found at RSS Pieces (http://www.rsspieces.com/). As a blogger I am completely sold on the concept and my page rankings in Google are excellent, but to be successful you have to invest the time and energy to achieve results.

If I was a Realtor and just starting out as a blogger I would create a community blog and report everything there is to report on in that community. Over time, if you write a post regularly, the search engines will reward you with higher page rankings when people search for information about that community.

Hope this helps.

In my opinion a blog is like your own little electronic newspaper which you can use to reach out to people. Blogs are great because the Search engines love them and will place them fairly high in their indexes fairly quickly.

Active Rain is a Blog
http://WWW.RealEstateWebmasters.com allows you to setup a blog for free
wordpress is good
squidoo is good.

lots of other options as well. you can even set one up on your own site.

If you do start up a blog make sure that it is something that you want to be committed to for a long... long time. Otherwise when Google sees that a regularly updated blog is beginning to not so regularly be updated, the ranking and importance of that blog begin to fall and then there is a whole lot of time and work that begins to disappear. But if you really want to and are committed, it is a really great thing for getting people to know you and getting people to you!