The essential difference between a blog and a Forum is, in a Forum, the topic or the thread is important and not the person who initiated the thread. Since it is a forum, it bases itself on the collective inputs of its members whereas in a blog people subscribe to (or are interested in reading) the blog owners writings and views. So a Forum is community oriented and a blog is personal. Blogs are normally used by individuals because they are the best advertising grounds for a person. Forums, on the other hand tend to be neutral in nature and orientation.
The advantage of blogs and forums is that they give people a chance to read what you and others have said, have their say, and ask questions. They provide your site with a centre of interest, and once the search engines see that people are going to your site to participate in an interesting discussion, then they give you well deserved extra ranking points for the service you are contributing.
For a blog we need to:
Both blogs and forums should be easy to use, show clearly who is contributing on what topic, and when the post was created. Blog marketing is a new science which can be very effective. Make sure you have interesting content, that you have links to your blogs and forums from emails that you sent out, ideally have a link from the home page of your website. Blogs and forums are di fficult to get started and require your energy and enthusiasm to make them work, but when theyt do they pay valuable dividends in user interactivity, increased profile, and higher volumes of site traffic.
