On paper, including a forum onto a blog seems like a good idea.
After all the typical forum has so much content that there’s a higher likelihood that it will pull traffic from Google.
The downside to this is if you’ve been paying attention to webmaster forum rankings over the last five years is that Google has ben showing less love to forums for whatever reason.
That’s just a cold, hard reality.
Forums to put it simply, have fallen out of favor with Google.
It’s obvious that Google is more interested in established and more controlled information hubs like Reddit and Quora.
But if you are thinking about integrating a forum onto your blog let me give you another reason to think about it.
The second reason is that you need a lot of content for a forum to take a life of its own.
Unless your plan is to quickly set up a forum and then let it die, you need to be consistent in creating threads to mimic real conversations.
So, you’re going to be switching from different accounts to make it look like different people have joined your forum and there’s this actual organic conversation happening among those people.
That’s a lot of work.
Are you willing to put in the time?
Are you willing to commit to this level of work?
Sure, each post may not be all that long, in fact you can even copy and paste a lot of your content but, the interaction has to look legit and this means switching from one account to another.
That’s quite a commitment.
Another alternative is that you can hire somebody from Fiverr, or quota-based outsourcing platforms like Cognoplus.
Cognoplus is great for forum marketing, because you pay people based on a quota you don’t pay them based on time.
But regardless, if you go the outsourcing route, your expenses pick up quite a bit.
Ideally, you should just leave forums out of blogs, because they require totally different site management dynamics.
Instead, just focus on stocking your blog with high-quality content that your targeted readers would actually want to read.
You don’t have to dump them all at once.
You can choose to stick to a disciplined blog-posting schedule, maybe five posts a month or less.
As long as you’re consistent and as long as you’re publishing content that people will want to read using long tail keywords or easier to rank keywords you should be fine.
