How To Improve Your Blog: Forums

There are a lot of bloggers who prefer creating their own content on the web and build up their community by providing more value to their readers on a consistent basis. But the one to many approach has a lot of limitations. You may have spent time to create valuable content for your readers in the past, but by not allowing your readers to get more engaged and contribute to your community, you are limiting its grow. One of the best ways to get your readers more involved is by adding a forum board to your blog.

So why is adding a forum to your blog important? After all, your readers can easily communicate with you and others through your comment section. A forum is in a sense a many to many form of communication. Everybody can be an author (starter of a thread) and a part of other people’s discussions as well. Forums used to be very popular in the past, and while they may have lost some of their luster with the advent of the social media and Web 2.0 services, there is still value in having one on your blog just to solidify your community further.

Thanks to solutions such as PHPBB and vBulletin, you can start your own forum fast without having to do too much work. The customization process will take a bit of time, but you can always hire a professional to design a custom skin for your forum system. If you want to install a forum system on your blog, you have two options. You can always go with a free system such as PHPBB. If you want a more advanced system, with custom plugins and modules, a premium service such as vBulletin is worth a look. Let’ see how these systems work:

vBulletin: it’s a forum script used by most professional bloggers and top online communities out there. It’s not only flexible, but the fact that you receive support from the company helps. Problems will always show up when you expect them the least. The last thing you want to deal with is lack of support for the script you have used on your website. vBulletin is search engine optimized as well and allows you to easily charge your users if you want to set up a paid community.

PHPBB: it’s a free service that lets you create a forum board for your blog fast. You obviously have to stay up to date with the latest software releases and security patches. There are also a lot of hackers and crackers out there who may target your forum, so it’s a bit of a risky proposition going with PHPBB. But it’s free and has a solid community of developers behind it.

All in all, adding a forum will allow your readers to contribute more to your community and help grow it with you. It will add to your workload on a daily basis. You may even need to hire moderators. At the same time, you are going to have a lot of user generated content on your hand in no time.