Jordan Hardy

Both of these can be very useful but neither should replace your business website. Some websites are just a blog or a forum, but that is because that is their primary purpose. If you have a business and you want to share information with the world online, a blog is the way to go. If you want to get people talking on your website or getting questions and answers from your team members and each other, for sure set up a forum.

Generally, blog entries get indexed faster on search engines, and can drop fast. To keep your blog alive, at least one to five postings should go live per week. Meanwhile, you may not need to post to your forum for a whole week to keep search engines finding it, as users may perpetuate and sustain activity.

Blogs are ideal for:

• a bunch of team members to discuss common threads.
• one person to share their thoughts.
• quick listings in search engines.
• a person or a company with time to devote to the blog.
• minimal audience activity, as readers can generally post comments at most.
• little monitoring, as blogs can be set to not let comments go live unless approved.
• to give out more information than you will receive.

Forums are ideal for:

• questions and answers.
• a wide range of topics.
• longer lasting threads for people to find.
• long term search engine indexing.
• less time needed of monitoring posts.
• full discussions.