Real Estate Views from St Pete

Sam Miller, a fellow CyberStar®, asked me to explain the difference between Groups and Affiliates. I started to get long winded so decided to blog it, as other ActiveRain members may have the same question.

On the left side of your personal home page, there is a GROUP category and an AFFILIATE category.  

A GROUP, to me, is topic or subject related. The CyberStar® group would be where you see things of interest to and related to all the CyberStars®. The Photography group would be where you talk about things relating to photography. After you've written a blog, and put in your tags, and chosen Members Only or Public for viewing, you then include it in various groups. Following the basic "for real estate professionals" and "for consumers" are a list of the groups you've chosen to join. Click any of these that apply. Sometimes you'll have a post that will go only one place, other times it may fit more than one group or category. Just because you're a Cyberstar® you wouldn't post all of your blogs to that group.  Or, you can post a blog and send it only to a group, not to all ActiveRainers nor to the public. You might also want to include postings in state groups, franchise groups - whatever you'd like.

An AFFILIATE is people related. In the ancient history of ActiveRain you had one big bucket of Affiliates - now you can classify them into subcategories of your own.  To add an affiliate, you go to their home page (you can search their last name through the Search button at the top of most page views) and click on the ADD as AFFILIATE on top of the person's photo. It's up to each one of us to add whatever classifications we want - and you can add a person to one or more. For instance, I might add someone to my general affiliate category, then to Resorts, then to Luxury Agents, then to CyberStars®.  In my main bucket, which I've renamed to Colleagues, are people I know, and people whose blogs I've come to enjoy, so that I don't want to miss them. You might choose to have one sub category for people you know, and another for favorite bloggers. Your choice!

What's the point of Affiliate subcategories?  One is easy contact. You can click on the category or subcategory and you'll get a photo and link to every person you've added there. You can also make comments about that person - easier when you're adding one at a time than if you're catching up and adding 100. Second, you can click Posts (in parenthesis after the affiliate category name). There are over 10,000 ActiveRain members now, and most days I don't have time to read everyone's postings. So, I can click start my time by clicking on Colleague Posts and know that I won't miss the posts from my favorite bloggers. Or, I may want to set up a category for Lenders, and include people like Brian Brady, so that when I want to go back and find some lending posts, I can click there - and get my favorite lenders, not all lenders.  With my CyberStar® subcategory, I can look and see all the postings from CyberStars®, no matter what topic they're writing about. 

Sharon Simms, Real Estate Agent selling homes in St. Petersburg, Florida, the Gulf Beaches and the Tampa Bay area.