Am I understanding this correctly?  If I blog about a city in my state and to the prospective clients in that area, it will show up on a search for that city?

Yes Karen, if you were to write about your city (Warwick) and add it to a consumer catagory such as about a region, market reports, etc, and also specify the region it belongs to it will appear in the regional pages. 

For example the regional page for Warwick is:

http://activerain.com/states/RI/Kent%20County/Warwick/real-estate

Nothing there yet...  Only the summary of your post will appear there so a buyer or seller would have to go back to your blog to read the whole post.

Matt - There are a lot of us that use little smiles :) or :> in the posts.  Is it possible to add little faces that we can click to insert?  I can show you if you email me.  Viewing the example means going to a members only site using a password.

rfk@gryphonusa.com

Matt one thing I would like to ask, the posts that are geared for consumers shouldn't be included in the comments average calculations. If I go write 10 posts of great local content to fill in some cities and drive more traffic to this site I will end up with maybe one or two comments on each and it will effect my Top blogger rankings. Now these rankings are not the only thing to worry about and that is why I have so many market updates that already drag down my average, but being in the top does add exposure.

With a change like this I think that we will see more agents willing to write posts for the consumer. It isn't even my idea, this has been brought up a number of other times in comments on other posts. 

Ken, the consumer posts aren't included in the blog rankings, actually they haven't been for a little while, so I guess we we are reading your mind :)

Matt, good additions as always. One question. There are lots of property listings and ads showing up on the "all blogs-no ads" section. Are these just categorized wrong and have the folks been sent an E-mail to correct them? I have no problem scrolling by them, just checking. 

Bryant: There seems to be a bug with listings showing up under no ads, will get this fixed.

Matt,

This is great news. Thanks for the oportunity!

Matt, is the listing post points a bug or did that change, too?  Just wondering.

Matt that explains why my ranking jumped. Makes a lot more sense now.

Interesting development - would be interesting to get a reporting matrix going that identifies transactions resulting from this facet of exposure to the consumer.

Bugs are crawling everywhere. points, gold stars, tallying, quick pass me the Raid.

Thanks for all of your hard work Matt.

GREAT JOB KEPT IT UP

The new categories are definitely consumer-friendly and a step in the right direction. Thanks for the upgrade.

I am glad for the updates and the changes that are made to keep us ahead of the game.

ActiveRain Rules - thank you thank you thank you!

Another very cool thing you have done! Thanks for continuing to improve an already top notch site.

Pete Willner
Who Will? Pete Will!

I think all of the changes are great!

I'm looking forward to seeing the consumer side take off as the real estate side has.

Can't wait to see what you guys will do next!  I think making the connection between the consumer and the Realtor is the next logical step to take this thing you have created and catapult into super-blogdom!

<<buckling my seat belt and preparing for catapult>>!!

Matt, you will have to share the traffic stats with everyone in the coming months. I think this is a step in the right direction to bring in consumer visitors. I'm going to start tracking some of my posts about specific areas and see how they do in the organic results. -Charles

Jacqulyn, will post some traffic stats when I get back into town tomorrow.  They flattened out for about a month but are starting to climb again.  I think we average about 4,600 unique visitors a day right now, and about 120k page views per day.