Day Three of Darren Rowse's 31 Days to Building a Better Blog and my assignment was to find and join a forum related to my blog's topic. If you'll recall yesterday's post, I mentioned that I feel a little unfocused lately, so defining my "topic" is easier said than done.

At any rate, Darren says that joining forums can help you with:

• Developing relationships in your niche
• Online branding of your blog
• Ideas and learning for posts
• Increasing your readership

I'm already a member of several forums, so joining another one didn't really resonate with me. I can barely keep up with what I have now.

What I did realize, though, is that my participation in the forums to which I belong has gone way down. Many of the activities I used to conduct through forums--asking questions, engaging in conversation, etc.--I now do mostly through my blog. This means, of course, that I'm missing out on connecting to people who aren't active in the blogosphere, so I should probably increase that activity.

Key Learning

• I need to pay more attention to forum posts to 1) participate in the conversation and 2) identify questions to answer or topics to write about. I'm going to try to do at least one post to a forum this weekend.

• I should be sure to add my blog URL to my signature.

Finding Your Own Forums
The three best ways I've found to identify forums are to:

• Conduct a Google search
• Search through Yahoo Groups
• Ask people in your field what forums they belong to.

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Challenge Update
I'm happy to report that Sue Waters of Mobile Technology in TAFE has decided to play along, so you'll see her blog listed in the sidebar and you can read her first post. Sue has also recruited another participant--Frances McLean of My Technology Addictions. So our little group is continuing to grow.
 

In the meantime, Laura Whitehead has been doing her thing (a lot of good insights in her post) and Cammy Bean is worried about falling behind after I threw her into the deep end on this. (I told her that with the schedule I've just realized I have for the month, I'll be falling behind first and she can publicly mock me when it happens.) And the SmokeFree Wisconsin gang has their first post up, too.

It's not too late for you to join in the fun. We're not hard core here, so if you want to jump in where ever, that's cool with us. We're just here for the learning and the experience. Email me if you want to participate.