I have a blog SciFreak and I have been thinking about incorporating a forum for it. But, do you think that it is a good idea to build a forum off of a blog or to create a forum and then build a blog off of the forum? I am looking for anyone's opinion.

I have a blog at the root of my site, and a forum in the sub dir
www.vbulletinsetup.com and I love it.

but I also have a forum, that I'm adding blogs to for the members.lol

so, I guess I'm not much help.. I think blog to forum is good, then you can use the blog as a CMS

I've seen blog->forum work quite well, as well as blog and forum started at the same... I can't really recall a successful blog that was spawned from a forum. So I would go with blog->forum. The key, of course, is to have a good blog that brings a decent amount of traffic.

So, build up a blog that gets a nice amount of traffic each day and then link to the forum. That way, there is some nice traffic to the forum from the already created blog. Good idea!

Yep, Darren Rowse is actually doing a case study right now on his digital photography blog that has just opened up a forum.

Same here, Zune User started out as a blog and has a good following. I am now slowly starting to push those users to the forums.

yup..i was thinking the same point, since a forum without a lot of members seem to be like 'dead forum'. The main point is to get as much as visitor from your blog.:yes:

Well, my theory on it is that if I can get a lot of people to my blog, then there will be a sudden burst of traffic to my forum when it does start. I am not sure if I want to start a forum, though, because it seems like so much work compared to running blogs. I might wait until my site grows more.

I feel Blog to Forum is a good idea and I have found it goes well with the community. There are some successful blogs who have a great forum also.

My site started as a forum, but I added vBlogetin to it.

A problem I am finding now is that comments on my blog entries are actually better suited as forum discussions. The vBlogetin software keeps everything seperate from the forum conversations. Not sure if this is an issue that I need to deal with in terms of what and how I write, or if I really need to create a clear delineation between what I want for blog content versus forum content.