Should Blogs Have Forums? Pros & Cons

Let’s discuss one more way to market blogs. It seems to me that many blog owners even don’t know that there is an excellent way to increase blog popularity and get much more visitors.

So, what is a forum and how could it help us (blog owners)?
Forums are a natural extension of blogs. Once your blog has a regular following and traction in your niche, forums offer the best solution for growing your brand and the community around it.

If your blog is growing, then a forum is probably the right step to take your blog to the next level and help you dominate your niche.

There are bloggers out there whose blogs are begging for forums – these blogs are niche leaders and for them a forum is simply a continuation of their brand-building process.

Why should blogs have a forums? Forums continue the dialog and expands upon information within the blog for questions and answers. It can even create it’s own unique discussions based upon tangents from the blog.

What types of blogs should have forums? Any blog that requires more traffic should have a forum.

You might think that having a forum is not the right move for your blog.

The question isn’t about adding a forum – the question is enhancing community value. Blog comments don’t give readers the freedom to start topics and to share their knowledge the same way that forums do.

Building a forum around your blog can be a challenging but worthy task. The important question here is: why do you want a forum?

1. Because it is an easy way to build a community.
3. It can help your blog by increasing the rate of discussion and interaction on your blog. It means much more traffic.
2. I want more visitors and more money.
3. I want to share my thoughts and interact with my visitors, beyond what I wrote on the blog.
4. I am passionate about my niche and I could write about it endlessly.

Before making the decision, though, let’s evaluate the pros and cons:

Pros:

More Traffic
1. If the forum takes off, not only would you be able to build a bigger community around the blog, but your site would now have two sources of traffic: your blog readers and the forum members. Chances are most of them would be common, but some might not, which increases the scope of traffic even more.

Building Community
2. Forums offer a great way for your readers to continue their conversation off the blog while still “on the blog”. They build communities, where members help each other as much as the blogger helps them. And when the blogger isn’t around the answer a question, members of the forum community often jump in, covering for the blogger. People still get the answers to their questions, working as a team. For serious interaction with your readers, forums can be highly beneficial. Forums can help your blog by increasing the rate of discussion and interaction on your blog.

2. As a blogger you will post on a certain topic everyday. Suppose you just wrote something on social networks. Your readers will be able to discuss about it in the comment section. But what if the readers want to talk about some other topic that you haven’t covered? What if they have unrelated questions? If you have a forum they can discuss it there, post questions and so on.

3. If your community is quite active, there are good chances that topics will appear in the forums naturally, and you may get ideas for new posts. So instead of visiting other blogs and sources to get new information, you can find some inspiration for your content in your own forum, and this is a very efficient way to discover what your readers want to read about.

The picture does seem rosy here, but before you start finalizing which forum software you should install, take a look at the cons of having forums. (Oh yes, its not all rosy.)

Cons:
Building a online community like a forum is hard work. I’ll say it again – building a community is hard work. Are you prepared for this? It may take months, or sometimes years. Until that time you will have to be very active in the forums; moderating, participating in the conversation and whatnot.

A successful blog doesn’t imply a successful forum. Even if your blog is getting a lot of attention from visitors and social media, don’t be amazed, if you see only one sign up in your forum per week. There are plenty of examples around the blogosphere with forums that have a couple of dozen members and where most threads are filled with spam.

Convinced that forums expand the blog and that forums are of fantastic benefit to bloggers, especially popular and well established blogs, including multiple blogger blogs, Darren Stuart went looking for blogs that would benefit from forums. He admitted that it some took some convincing. In the end, some bloggers he contacted decided against them.

Their reasons? There is a justified assumption that forums require a lot of work. In addition to monitoring comments, comment spam, and contributing content to your blog, a forum requires more monitoring and work if they get active enough. Many bloggers think this will take time away from other more productive work. Having worked with and on many forums for over a decade, I believe that assumption is correct.

Forums need strong leadership and monitoring to keep them inline with the comment policies, tracking the many different conversations. Some forums are run very strictly, with tangents not permitted, while others are all over the place as people chat and get to know each other.

If a forum does create a strong and social community, they may want to meet outside of the forum, adding more logistical work for the blogger.

Being the decision-maker and responsible for what stays or goes in a forum can be a tough job. No one really likes being the bad guy, deleting comments, censoring, and kicking people off the forum. Policies for comments and discussion have to be made and enforced. Someone has to do it. If you aren’t up to the task, then don’t start a forum.

If you don’t have the time to monitor and maintain a forum, and can barely keep up with comments on your blog, don’t start a forum.

 
But what is a way out? Some bloggers use the next method: just contact a forum owner and offer him/her cooperation (you put a link to the forum in the main bar) and visitors consider the forum and the blog as something incorporated. In this way bloggers benefit above-mentioned pros and avoid cons – your blog has forum and it doesn’t take your time away from other more productive work (no need to fight spam etc. as it’s work of the forum owner). This is not my “invention” and I don’t even try to patent this method of blog promotion as there are many bloggers who came to the idea long ago.