Blogs are a great interactive medium where one person writes and then others comment on the article. I adore blogs for my clients because it’s a cost effective way for bootstrapping entrpreneurs to get their marketing messages onto the web easily and effectively.
Jack Hughes has pointed out that the rise of blogging forums may be pointing to flaws in blogs….
If there is a "flaw" to blogging it’s this: creating content is TOUGH! As Jack and other bloggers have found, staying motivated to blog regularly requires a hurculean effort, especially if your talents don’t lend themselves to writing. A blog without posts is like a day without sunshine and blog irregularity is a common affliction amongst many blogs.
While blogs require consistency in effort… forums on the other hand don’t. Forums are a "set it and forget it" option for many web site owners. Start a thread, drive some traffic and soon you’ll find other people are generating content for your forum. It’s no secret that search engines love forum threads and forums really don’t require a lot of effort on the owner’s part.
One client of mine launched a forum and she set it and forgot about it. It didn’t take long for the forum to get active and popular. That is when the problems began. Once her forum posts began rising in the SERPs…. she began getting the seedier crowd nosing around. Before long, a security hole was exposed and patched by the developer of the bulletin board software, except my client didn’t upgrade her installation. It wasn’t long before the bad guys had gained access to her site through a back door. When she went to check on her site one day, she saw there were 10’s of thousands of spam posts. The board was dead. Anyone wanting information on the original topic would find post after post advertising seedier sites on the internet.
If you want to launch a forum, it is truly the "easier softer way"…. but it’s definitely not a "set it and forget it" option.
I would say the "set it and forget it" appeal is the reason blogging forums are on the rise.
Hi Kathy, I think that forums look easy from the outside but are in fact really difficult to get right as your client discovered.
I guess it is everybody’s dream to create a site and for others to populate it with great content. I’m sure it happens, but it is more likely that you are going to have the unremitting grind of software upgrades, moderating and forum seeding to do.