Promote your blog by participating in forums

Participation in niche forums is an excellent way of promoting your blog and finding new readers. It can be fun as well. The forums I participate in are also great educational tools; I’m always learning new stuff about my niche.

I’ve participated in one forum for over ten years and this is right on the topic of one of my blogs which is bird watching (often called birding). The forum is called Birding-Aus with over 500 people all over Australia contributing their sightings of birds here in Australia. I contribute to the forum reasonably regularly and it always generates some traffic and a few comments. This is because I always have a link to my three blogs in the signature line. People must be clicking out of curiosity.

Ask a question:

On some occasions I’ve deliberately made a post on the forum with a question and then with an invitation to answer it or comment on my blog, again with a link to the relevant article. This has also generated a good source of new readers and people prepared to comment.

A source of guest bloggers:

Forums can also be a source of guest bloggers on your blog. On one occasion I made a post on the forum outlining a birding identification blooper I’d made and invited others to share their similar experiences. Over twenty people contributed their bloopers which I used – with their permission – as the basis of a series of about twenty posts.

How to get involved in forums:

Darren Rowse on ProBlogger has covered this topic really well so I won’t repeat it here. It’s called Search for and join forums on your blog’s topic.