A few days ago I received an email from the company I do paid posting work for. They had mentioned that they had seen this site and was wondering if I would like a view from someone who runs a paid posting company. Obviously I bit their hand off, so here it is the view from the trenches.
Paid Posting from a Posting company perspective
My partner and I put together a paid posting company because at the time I was struggling getting my own forum up and running and the services I used were unreliable, we both have some web skills and business savvy and thought it could net us a few easy dollars, with an original goal of $500 a year each in mind
The trickiest part was the staff and management system but we were lucky to find a firm that did what we were looking for and with a bit of tweaking did the job we were after. From concept to inception was about 6 weeks.
Once live we then of course needed to find clients, much easier than we at first thought joining the major webmaster forums was a good start and within a day or two we had our first order, from there we have gone from strength to strength and have hit the top of Google for the keyword strings we are interested in. Staffs are plentiful; work is flowing in - easy as falling of a log running a forum posting business? NOT!
Here are the major headaches we have keeping it together.
- Long-term staff
- Staff applications
- Un-reliable
- Poor Quality
- Topics
- Ripping off
- Too quick
- Posting yourself
- Time
All posting companies want staff who are long term, so you specify of course you are after a long term relationship, 95% of paid posting staff disappear from our radar after one or two weeks posting, and after two months of inactivity they are struck from our books. We have literally two handfuls of staff whom have been with us 3 months plus and are still active.
Due to the fact that staff disappear so quickly means you need to keep a stream of adverts up and running requesting staff, and you can have up to 20 applications a day from the Indian sub-continent from individuals who level of English is marginal at best, from every 20 applications there may be one diamond.
Those that do get accepted we find that 50% never actually login and take up a job, which makes you wonder why they bothered applying in the first place. We guess that they are hoping that all the jobs we get are on X-Boxs, World of WarCraft of totally generic talk about anything you want forums.
Even though each applicant is vetted to see if their English is to an acceptable standard we find on occasion that once employed the standard of English can plummet (you then find their application threads were cut and pasted from elsewhere!) after a client complaint or when checking work when a payment is requested
Clients of course are having trouble launching their forum, generally because they are in a very niche market and they do not want paid posters to post in the 'Welcome' category all the time, they want on topic comment. Many staff totally fail with this and post off topic and do not keep to the 25 word minimum threads / replies which of course brings in complaints from clients
There are plenty of wise guy staff who try to fiddle their figures claiming for work they say they have done so checks have to be done at each payment request to make sure the figures tally. DO not ease of and think 'oh is so and so they are reliable' most staff will chisel if they can, even your favorite
Clients book a job to a specific time line. "I want job X over 4 week" Not a problem for us but for some staff, they see a new job and bash into it doing 50% in one day, effectively spamming the forums, making the client unhappy – you tell the staff 'stop spamming' the reply comes 'sorry' and they do it on the next job, staff member ejected, client to be appeased.
As I said several jobs are on very, very, niche subjects and the staff of course want an easy life and so my partner and I find ourselves joining these forums to get them moving and completed on time (with help from some of the decent staff) – Our goal was to not post at all ourselves but we spend some time each day posting
All of the above takes the two of us between 1 – 2 hours every day which can be frustrating when so much of it could be avoided
What makes it good to run a posting company?
- Return Work
- Cash
- Great Staff
Several clients have been with us since our launch and order on a regular basis which means we must do something right. 50% of clients return for one or more packages
You will never be rich, it can never be your full time job but it is a useful income supplement
Some staff interact really well and take great pride in what they do and are very skilful and when they take up a job you think 'oh good so and so is on it' it takes some of the stress away.
