I have a “how to” blog and one of the articles brings in almost half the blog’s traffic. That article also gets 3 to 5 comments per day which are generally follow-up questions to my article. This has been going on the past 6 months and the page currently has nearly 1000 comments. I also noticed some people kept coming back to the same article and they started sharing their ideas about the article’s subject and they also happen to respond to new reader’s questions. Should I build a forum on the subject and try to funnel the visitors from the blog to the new forum and grow the forum that way? Or would it be better to just leave the blog as is and let it receive fresh contents in the form of comments? Thanks for your help.
If you have small traffic / activity on the blog, it’s not easy to have the forums run better. I’ve seen some super active blogs start a forum and fall flat on their nose. A forum means a lot more work and effort, I’d first try to make that blog run smoothly and have at least 30-50 replies to each article, than get to a forum. Maybe write shorted interesting articles daily (2-3 at least) that would lead your visitors to comment and promote like crazy). That’s what I’d do first.
I agree with dojo. Just keep the blog with comments.
This is so true. What you see is only one page of your entire blog site-only one topic yet. It’s not very convincing enough to me for you to build a forum for that either. But it does seems a very good option to keep your blog that way for the mean time and then make a transition later on when you are already sure you are getting a thousand commenters in each page or with every blog.
I’ve had the example of a fellow blogger in my country. let’s say the guy has 4000-5000 uniques/day and 70-100 comments at each blog post. he’s posting 4-5 times/day. Even with such a successful blog (he’s one of the biggest bloggers in our country), he wasn’t able to “raise” the forums to a good standing. And we talk insane traffic and community involvement.
do both. Who knows how it’ll pick up 
Forums are totally different, u’ve to build up content to actually start getting traffic, user activity.
Thanks everyone for all your advice. I think it’s pretty clear that I should stick to blogging for the time being lol~ You learn something new everyday.
I would really do the same too.
Me personally I will do both! I have a blog and a forums that I’m starting. but don’t stop blogging because you have a forum.
It will probably depend on the topic of the blog. If you think the topic can be expanded further, then the forum would indeed be very useful.
agree with dojo ,forum are not easy to manage.