This week’s link love is quite brief, but that’s probably best. After all, I’m about to set out for two more vineyards (in hurricane/tornado weather no less)! Wish me luck!

• ProBlogger’s Brainstorm 10 Ways to Expand Your Blog
• ProBlogger’s Forums — How to Expand Your Blog #1
• The Urban Muse’s How to Give Yourself a Raise
• Raptitude’s How to Make a Life List You’ll Actually Do: A Comprehensive Guide

Worrying about being all talk and no action, I decided to finally get off my butt this weekend and set up forums for Freelancedom.

I had initially intended to integrate forum software with WordPress, but was having trouble on that end. I mean, I’m not the most web-savvy individual out there. So I finally admitted defeat and set up a forum hosted through Activeboard.

The downsides? A banner ad up top, and no link back to Freelancedom.

So I’m not sold on this, but I’d like you guys to check it out…see how it works…let me know about any problems in functionality…

Also, let me know about any category gaps you’d like me to fill in. This is basically a rough draft, and can be updated at any time.

In the meantime, I might test out other forum hosts, and link to them in future posts, so that we can all compare and contrast.

There’s a link to the forums in the sidebar as well.

Let me know how it goes!

Now that the new year is here, it’s time to step things up here on Freelancedom. To that end, I’ve been researching forum software, social bookmarking plugins, and advertising programs.

Learn more, after the jump:

Last week, I mentioned an interest in creating forums here at Freelancedom. I’ve been doing a bit of research, learning about outside software such as SMF and Vanilla, and WordPress forum plugins such as bbPress.

I actually attempted to upload bbPress to my system, but keep receiving error messages. This newest version is only a couple days old, so I’m waiting to see if the bugs will be fixed sometime this century. So that’s on hold. But, in the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing about the forum software you know about or have used.

…

I’ve also started drawing up categories for the eventual forums: cover letters, portfolios, finances (taxes, budgets, rates), job leads, shameless self-promotion, productivity tips, coffee break, marketing tactics, book reviews, and other resources. Is there anything I’m missing?

…

One plugin I was able to upload successfully was Sociable, which automatically adds links to your favorite social bookmarking sites at the bottoms of your posts.

There are 99 different social bookmarking sites to choose from! At the moment, I’ve just included e-mail, StumbleUpon, TwitThis, and Digg, but I’d be interested in learning more about the social bookmarking sites you’re using.

…

For some time now, I’ve been incredibly passive, as far as advertising goes. I’ve considered seeking out advertisers directly, but am unsure site traffic os high enough yet. So for the moment, GoogleAdsense has been hiding in the margins.

I’m looking at some other advertising services, such as Performancing and OpenX. Anyone care to share the advertising programs they’re use on their own sites, and why they love or loathe them?

…

Finally, some of you may have noticed an error in the comments section of posts.

The links left by commenters in the name/url fields have been broken. It turns out that this is a problem inherent in WordPress’s latest version. My husband — whom I must acknowledge is awesome — fixed this coding for me, and links are once again working!

Carry on!