benefits of adding a blog?

[mattyk72]

I've heard that adding a blog to your site can help your rankings by building your incoming links. Just wondering what experiences anyone has had with this. I figured it was worth the shot so I put a blog on my site.

[Peggy]

I don't know about all that, but I know the members love it! I'm thinking seriously of doing this myself.

[b2w]

My members never touched it when I had it installed. I had to take it out.

[Peggy]

You're kidding? Mine have been bugging me for one

[b2w]

You're kidding? Mine have been bugging me for one

I thought it was going to take off too :confused: , but no, they had no interest. They love threads. :p

[Elsie]

i had a similar experience with the journals and user pages. they were very underused, so we got rid. :)

[b2w]

i had a similar experience with the journals and user pages. they were very underused, so we got rid. :)

I had to take out VbJournal too. Plus it didn't look right.

[Joeychgo]

I asked my members first - they pretty much told me they wouldnt use it.

[Elsie]

I asked my members first - they pretty much told me they wouldnt use it.

ditto.

[zendiver]

I too thought it would help get more activity but no one has touched vbJournal but the two admins. I have it easily accessible but it doesn't get used. I also had vbDrupal installed, but had way too many issues with the database after the installation.

Good question though and I honestly thought it would do well.

[dakar]

I've had just the opposite experience, users loved them when I was running phpBB, now after switching to vB I had to put the old site up on another domain still using phpBB and the blog hack until I can find a decent one to push under vB. I've been playing with MU-wordpress but intergrating it isn't proving as easy as I'd thought it would be. vBJournal doesn't appear very stable with later versions of MySQL and PHP5.

Any suggestions for a stable add-on for vB?

[dcristo]

For a business or personal site and I can see it working, but not for forums.

[Noppid]

How many ways can we give members to get a point across before they get confused is the question here IMO.

I've seen forums fail because of IRC and Chat. I've seen blogs and journels fail on forums.

The bottom line is to give the folks a means of communication everyone undersatnds and have a well defined avenue available to access that medium.

The days of build it and they will come are gone IMO. You must promote and in some cases spend serious money to make a forum sucessfull it appears these days.

The guys from doinks and that forum search are well aware of this. As you see, they are running around where ever they can hawking their wares and spending adwords dollars. They have a plan. If it works in the long run remains to be seen.

We all have to present ourselves in such a way we convert members due to giving them what they want and keeping them on our websites be they forums, blogs, chats or whatever.

[Hell³]

I'm thinking of just adding a "rants and ramblings" forum in my site instead of adding a blog hack, beign a general discussion board I think it will do little harm.

The main reason I believe the blogs, journals, shoutboxes, chats, irc channels create a paradigm for a forum is the availability and visibility that each of this alternatives have. Blog/journal hacks are secluded, wich is good in some cases, but in others they aren't used for that very same reason; shoutboxes are highly visible, sometimes overriding the forum in availability; irc channels are a mix, but in my experience they are bad news for a forum, factioning the userbase, those "in the know" vs. those who are not, the veterans vs. "the noobs" or whatever other tag they want to categorize themselves, wich will happen sometime in the board history anyway, but IRC channels seem to catalize somehow this kind of events.

So noppid has a very valid point here, do you like forums?, do you like the way the promote comunication in his default installment?, then keep'em that way and empower them, do not "over-diversify" them. Giving your users too many options clearly undermines it's importance in the concept of your site. Heck, you spent US$85/160 at least in them if you're visiting this site. I'd say concentrate in empowering the comunication concept forums have, and leave blogs, chats and the like in their own niche.

[Noppid]

You said that so well, I have a tear in my eye. :eek:

[dcristo]

Well said Hell. I still think Live Chat can work well depending on your memberbase, but you summed things up nicely.

[Hell³]

Hehe, thanks, I think I just had one of those rare lucid moments :D, now back to our regularly programmed schedule ;)...

[Peggy]

lmao!