Forums and blogs – is there a connection?

Forums*…aren’t those for people who want to talk about cars or plastic surgery? Apparently not! According to problogger’s challenge for the day, joining a forum and answering some questions can be a great way to add traffic to your blog. He suggests finding a forum that is discussing a topic that you care about – whether it’s jazz, animals, business or photography.

Since I have a wide range of topics that I write about, I needed to find something that had a lot of topics it covered. One of the networks that I am already part of, LinkedIn, has a great Answer’s Forum where people can ask questions of any nature and then vote on the best answer. Although a bit different than the traditional forum layout, I think that it qualifies. I have thought about being more active in this environment and today is a great day to start. For my challenge today, I have chosen a couple questions to answer:

How to make a really awesome facebook promotion about an event

Calculating ROI on social media initiatives

There is no right number of questions you can answer, and I may go back and answer more. The point is to start it and continue it, make it a goal to answer 1 or 2 a day and you will hopefully see the results fairly quickly. To get started, add your thoughts to questions that you have knowledge, and help someone. If nothing else, it makes you think, and gets your name out there. Feel free to share some of your favorite forums, or the new ones you discover!

Oh, and for those of you playing the home game** we are on Day 9 of problogger’s challenge. Day 8 challenge was an internal blog thing, not something that needed a post, but I do recommend checking out his tips for interlinking your posts.

*One point to the first person to tell me why this picture works for this post (or what it is)

**extra point if you can name where the quote came from.

Related posts:

1. Could Storify change how blogs are created?
2. Benefits of commenting on blogs
3. Deja Vu and Problogger. I am disappointed.