Forums vs. Blogs

To Blog or to (create a) Forum? That is the question.

Both powerful ways to build a loyal readership and repeat traffic to your site. While the underlying technology behind forums and blogs is virtually the same, each implementation is very much unique.

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Blogs = I speak, you listen
Blogs are a "one-to-many" medium, with the website owner writing the majority of the posts, allowing users to submit comments.

Blogs are often created to build authority in your niche, demonstrating your wealth of experience and knowledge in the target area.

Things to consider: Since you, as the website owner, will be required to submit posts on a regular basis to keep the blog lively and keep visitors coming, it is important to choose a topic close to heart and plan on allocating a certain number of hours every day/week for writing new posts.

Ghostwriters and filler posts don't work well in a blog environment. "Your voice" needs to remain consistent as you continually strive to keep your readers eagerly expecting your next post.

Blogs are often personal, whereby the owner will identify by name, post pictures illustrating his/her experiences and brand him/her self as a top authority in the field.

Forums = Collaborate with others
Forums are a "many-to-many" medium, where individuals sharing passion for the same topic, discuss among each other, posting public posts, replying to each other and sharing information.

Forums are created around a specific niche, in an attempt to build a high number of members who will communicate with each other and keep the forum active.

In a typical forum, you'll have 10% of the members engaging in 100% of the discussions, with the remaining 90% "lurking", reading messages but not posting any new information.

Things to consider: Once you achieve a critical-mass of posts and members in a community, a snow-ball effect will help in continually growing the forum
, with your primary job duty being keeping things under control - deleting spam posts and banning aggressive members.

From an SEO perspective, forums are usually better traffic-generation tools. The high number of posts (each post being a complete HTML page), lends itself to a higher number of indexed pages and more organic traffic. Blogs are good tools providing you can position yourself as an industry leader and secure a loyal readership.