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Create a Fan Base via WordPress, Yahoo! Groups, and Google+

We turn now from “cool” to “cool and somewhat more useful for doing business.” These are three sites you should know about and use:

• WordPress (www.wordpress.com). This free blogging tool and content management system is used by almost 20% of the top 10 million websites. With more than 60 million sites in all, it's the most popular blogging system around. This is where you may want to have your blog reside (we've agreed you're going to be blogging so you can establish your credibility as an authority in your field, right? Just checking).
• Yahoo! Groups (groups.yahoo.com). This is one of the world's largest collections of online discussion boards. You can think of each board as sort of a cross between an electronic mailing list and an Internet forum. You can read and post group messages on a group's page via email. Members of the group can decide whether to receive individual messages, daily digests, or special delivery emails informing them of events, relevant articles, topics for discussion, etc. Or, they can just opt to read posts on the site. Groups can be public or members-only. I belong to a lot of groups, both on Yahoo! and LinkedIn. These include my high school graduating class, my college alumni association, my college fraternity, my graduate school alumni association, my doctoral program alumni association, and more. I also belong to several groups related to my industry, including groups for higher education, for-profit higher education, colleges and careers, career counselors, etc. I need to know what's going on in my field at all times. The same goes for you.
• Google+ (plus.google.com). This is the second-largest social networking site in the world, after Facebook. It has 540 million monthly active users, who also use it to interact with Gmail.

All of these—and other sites you'll discover on your own—present an opportunity for you to learn, to connect with your colleagues worldwide, and to have them get to know you.