I created an Active Rain account last week and had to laugh at the email I received immediately following the first comment I left on another person’s blog entry. This reminded me of my days working at PayPal:

You’ve received a contact message from your Contact Form on the ActiveRain network.

Message details:
From: oscar_venance@myway.com
Email: oscar_venance@myway.com
Subject: oscar_venance@myway.com

oscar_venance@myway.com

A CALL FOR AN URGENT ASSISTANCE

From Oscar Venance

My dear,

I am Oscar Venance and I inherited an important sum of money from my late father who died in a recent crisis in Cote d’Ivoire. I wish to request for your assistance in investing this money in a lucrative venture under your directives and guidance in your country. I want you to assist me for the transfer of this sum of Eight million, five hundred thousand United State Dollars ($8.500,000) to your account designate hence I will give you the contact of the bank where the money is so that you can contact them immediately and discuss with them since I do not know much about financial issues. I will give you some resonable percentage from the total sum for your assistance while I pray that you do not betray me at last. Please it is important you contact me immediately for more clarifications on the next step hence it is my wish to relocate to your country as soon as this transaction is concluded.
Awaiting your immediate response.

God bless you.

Oscar Venance.

——————————————————————————–
Email sent from IP: 196.201.74.145

I shouldn’t say that I “laughed” at this because it really isn’t a laughing matter. The sad thing is that there are people out there who still fall for this type of scam. Hopefully the Active Rain community is onto Oscar’s little ploy…

SPARRproperties.com was officially launched a little over a week ago, and it is now time to assess the current results. In doing so, however, it is important to first define the criteria against which to measure success:

1. Number of unique visitors
2. Number of total visitors
3. Number of trend requests (which requires an email address)
4. Number of contact form submissions
5. Search Engine rank

Google Analytics will provide me with the information to answer #1 and #2; TopProducer will help me answer #3 and #4; searching for “Walnut Creek, CA real estate” in Google will answer #5. I’ll monitor these metrics on a weekly basis to see how well the site is performing and what efforts help move the needle in any of the 5 different criteria sections.

So, without further ado, here is where SPARRproperties.com stands today: