Day 9 is about joining a forum related to your niche and participating over a long period of time with goal being 1.adding value to your readers 2. piquing the interest of the forum readers enough to drive them back to your blog (by learning more about you in your forum profile.)

Directly joining a fishing forum and attempting to drive traffic away from it to your own blog seems a little shady. I know I would not want it done to me. (I did join a few newspaper sites and link back to roundvalleyfishing.com though)

Instead I have google alerts set up for every possible scenario concerning my niche and depending on the story i either link to it, comment in it or blog about it. I do leave comments in my local paper comments sections too but i really don’t see any value in it as far as the analytics data shows. I do join facebook groups and participate there, so this is the new “forum” for 2011.

I do have my own forum but it sees little activity. Facebook has killed the forum model for newer publications.

I believe this day 9 suggestion was more relevant pre facebook and google+ where sharing and filters were harder.