When it comes to sharing your thoughts online, there are many options available to you. Two of the most popular forms of interaction are blogs and forums. Both have their own individual characteristics, pro’s and con’s, but in many way blogs are a better conversational platform and here are 7 reasons why:
1. It’s all about you
Your blog will only be about topics you’re interested in. It’s always going to be on-topic.
2. You’re the moderator
Imagine how annoying it is when you spend time crafting a well-written forum post only for some trigger-happy moderator to come along and delete your post. Whether you cause it to happen or some other participant in the thread causes it, the net effect is that the time you spent composing that post is wasted.
3. You say what stays and what goes
It’s your blog. You can accept submitted content if you wish and if you don’t agree with what someone submits then you can make the decision not to publish it.
4. You get to keep all of the profits
Want to publish AdSense ads? Go ahead. Want to add some Text Link Ads? Why not! If you decide to promote some products then nobody has any right to accuse you of spamming. If they don’t like it, they can go elsewhere.
5. You’re building up your asset and not someone else’s
Content isn’t king. Anyone can publish any old rubbish and label it content. The real value lies in updated, relevant content, but why should you spend time and effort keeping somebody else’s website fresh when you could be doing the same thing to your own?
6. You’re not reliant upon someone else’s hosting
When someone else’s forum goes down because of a hosting related issue then all you can do is wait until the forum owner gets things fixed. If they’re otherwise occupied there’s nothing much you can do about it. This actually happened recently to a forum I frequent. It was down for days because the owner was too busy to rescue the hacked database.
7. It’s easier to blog!
If you’ve ever tried to start your own forum from scratch then you’ll know how difficult it can be to keep participants active until it reaches a critical mass whereby it can sustain its own growth. Blogging, on the other hand, only relies on you for content and because of its personal nature it’s much easier to reach out and involve other bloggers.
