Blogs and forums

I have some sites with forums and I have a couple of blogs on dedicated blog services. I'm now considering adding a blog onto a site that is mostly a forum.

The forum [which is so new I have no members] allows any registered member to post.
The blog will only contain entries from me and some other associates, it may or may not allow registered members to add comments, I'm not sure yet.

One part of me thinks it's a good idea, by posting in the blog, I start creating content and Google indexes it and it attracts new members.

The other part of me says it's redundant and confusing to have both a blog and forum.

 

Hi macdesign,

I'm wondering the same thing only backwards.

I just launched an Affiliate Marketing and SEO blog network packed with the best blogs and super SE optimized and know it's going to pull lots of good traffic once everything gets indexed. Just launched it last weekend and my traffic is more than doubling every day.

But I have also been wanting to launch a forum. I mod several though and know what a pain it can been to mod spammers and flamers and don't know if I want to deal with it. Blogging is nice cuz you don't have to let anyone reply if you don't want to. Yet I think forums can be much stickier.

I'll keep on eye on this thread to see if we get any good advice.

 

Doing the same thing, the forums are at the root of the domain and blog as a subdomain. I try to randomly use a few keywords in the blog with several links back to the fourms. It seems to be helping things a little, traffic is picking up a bit. The biggest problem is the domain is 6 months old and fighting the sandbox effect, page counts continually vary from 900 one day to 3000 the next.

 

I did this exact same thing - primary domain is a forum and I set up a sub domain as a blog.

I've been running with this setup for about 2 months and results, so far, have been great. The posts/articles on the blog stir up conversation in the forum among existing members, and, I've noticed that a lot of "fresh" traffic is hitting the blog first then heading to the forum to comment on the articles/posts in the blog. I think a forum/blog compliment each other very well if setup and maintained properly.

 

I think a blog should be like your company's newsfeed. You can give people info and updates and even though they won't be able to respond directly, you should add a link to a forum section where people can comment about it.
That will keep your blog your own voice and will encourage people to post in your forum as well .... just MO

 

Readers can always leave comments, I have a few ongoing dialogs with blog comments, which can be a bit strange. I was just wondering why they wanted me to check their poker site

 

Checked some logs

First site - 3 out of 185,087 hits
Second site - 1 out of 167,081

Doesn't help me much

 

Does it make a difference if it is "part of the site", not really because you can link to any site you wish from your forum or your blog.

So you have a blog that links to your forum or a forum that links to your blog, what is the difference

GFC has a good idea that might be good if you combine the sites, just use a sub-domain for the blog or the forum and it could help your SERP's

 

This system is pretty cool. It's a blog and a forum combined but separate.

http://communityserver.org/

 

***IGNORE my previous post - Checked some logs ..... wrong thread

 

that is a pretty good concept.