Forums vs Blogs

By Michael Gray
In Blogs, SEO  

In the SEO community and probably much of the technology world, there’s and undercurrent of debate right now, concerning blogs versus forums. Since I’m a bit of a renegade and a lone gun I figure I might as well come out and say what needs to be said.

Most of us who’ve come online to learn something end up in a forum at some point. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to defrag a hard drive, build a Linux server, or figure out how best optimize your pages, simply put forums are a great collection of archived knowledge. However as people grow in knowledge and experience something happens, they don’t get quite as much out of the forums as they used to, and let’s be honest you can only answer the same question so many times before it becomes, boring/bothersome/tiring or in some way just plain old unfullfilling. Yes, we all feel a sense of community and like helping others who where once wear we were a few years ago, but eventually you start getting less and less out of it than you used to, and while the information may be signal to some, eventually it becomes more and more like noise to you, and you long for the days when you were challenging yourself, pushing the boundaries of your knowledge and really learning something new on a regular basis. Here’s the reality, most forums are geared towards people who are at the less experienced end of the totem pole. Yes there are exceptions, but by and large newbies are the life blood of almost every forum.

So what’s an old forum hack to do? Usually they just moved on to different pastures. Sure maybe they would pop in every now and then, but they would stop contributing when the community was taking more than it was giving them. However something happened recently that changed all that, blogs. Yes I know people always had the ability to publish web pages and there’s nothing revolutionary about a blog. However what a blog did was take a CMS and made it easy and fun to use. So tired of telling newbies to read the FAQ for the 1300th time this month, and want someplace to talk about what interests you, what better place than your own personal monologuing podium known as a blog.

Now there’s a little piece of the puzzle I left out, can you guess what it is … adsense. Sure forums have been running banner advertising for years, but let’s be honest they never really made more than covering the hosting, and you were really lucky if you made enough profit to buy yourself lunch once a month. However once adsense entered the scene things changed. If you knew what you were doing or were willing to experiment, you could actually make some money form your forum. Not enough to retire on the French Rivera, but unless your forum was about ancient medieval folk dancing, chances are you could turn a profit. Eventually it happens one day for all older experienced forum members, they have a light bulb moment. I’m creating content and someone else is making a profit off of it. Combined with the other aspects which are less than full filing about a forum, starting a blog begins to look more and more attractive. They will directly profit from the work and content they write, and they don’t have to put up with someone else’s rules.

So are forums doomed to be domain of the less experienced talking about drivel day-in and day-out? No, but forums they are a changing. Looking to get more out a forum, go in write some nice tutorials to help grow some of the members up, if you do it well you may convert some of them to blog readers. Be helpful and answer questions now and then, just realize when it changes from discussion to debate, and stop participating when it does. Think of a forum as podium to get to reach a wider audience, by being a contributer and giving something away, hopefully you can build a larger regular audience.

Related posts:

1. Category SEO For Wordpress Blogs and Ecommerce I solved (
2. Still Think You Can Ignore Social Media, Blogs, YouTube and Blended Search Still thin
3. Thesis Tutorial – How to Add Adsense Section Targeting Using Adse