I have watched several of Richard Millington's videos.  He is a big proponent of forums. Still I wonder what the trade off is between forums vs. blogs.  In 2013 I moved my attention away from blogging (232 blogs in 2012 to 87 Blogs in 2013) to focus more on community engagement (0 Forum Discussions in 2012 to 60 Forum Discussions in 2013). I also moved the discussion to the top of the page. According to our analytics the forum grew from 0 to 7000 visitors while the blog shrank from 45K to 37K from 2012 to 2013. Of course the actual content of my forums and discussions also impact their popularity, but I do believe the largest indicator of traffic is the volume of blogs or discussions I post. I was hoping that the discussions would have more of a multiplier effect on our analytics but the number of visitors seem to be about proportional to the number of blogs and/or forums I post. Because I did not see a big boost in traffic based on the attention I gave to the discussions, I have since moved them below blogs, which tended to give me a slightly bigger bang for my time in terms of visitors. I find that discussions are easier to start than a blog in terms of my time, but a discussion requires more time as it evolves, where as a blog is typically more static. So I would
say the ratio of my time writing a blog vs. posting a discussion is one to one. Still, I find the analytics of discussions interesting and would like to pose the following questions:

Have you compared the analytics (# of unique visitors) between forums vs. blogs?

Have you found a saturation point as to the number of discussions that should be posted per week for a community that receives about 40K unique visitors annually?