Making the most of Paid Forum Posting
Done well with quality posters and posts, paid forum posting can be a real asset to a new or dead forum, however its not a fire and forget solution like most things worth while you have to work at it to be successful.
Is paid posting right for me?
Paid posting isn't right for every type of forum, a good general rule of thumb the more niche a forum is the less benefit you will get from paid forum posting or the more you will have to pay to find quality posters.
Finding a paid posting service
There are quite a few paid posting services around, with varying quality. Since you will be paying your own money for this service its important to find the best service possible.
A good rule of thumb is quality costs, so avoiding the bargain basement services is a good idea. If you can find out how much they are paying their posters per post, a figure of $0.10-$0.20 is normal, although it may cost more to get quality posters on very niche forums.
Its also always a good idea asking for references, ask the paid posting company for at least one forum they have worked on, have a look on that forum and see if you can spot the paid posters.
Get a set of trial posts done, most companies offer a trial posting service, the problem with this is you will not always get the same posters if you put in an order for more posts although most companies will try to if you ask.
Don't waste your money
If your forum was dead before paid posting it will almost certainly be dead after paid posting unless you can attract traffic. Paid posting is purely to help your forum reach critical mass it is not viable long term.
- Keep an eye on the quality of the paid posters. If any are not up to spec ask the paid posting company for a replacement.
- Make sure you post on your own forum, a forum full of paid posters will often stick out like a sore thumb, again the more niche the forum the less knowledge the posters will have, you can add that missing knowledge and make the posts look less fake. It will also help your forum poster target their posts.
- Keep an eye on how many posts particular users are making. Quite a few paid posters are just in it for the money and will make 20-30 low quality posts a day, its worth putting a limit on how many posts should be made a day of around 5-10. This wont be enough to stifle posts but should be enough to stop hit and run posting.
- Get your posts targeted. Most forums have a general chat area, unless told not to paid posters will bulk up their post count by posting things like jokes, this works for some types of forum if you don't think it will for yours ask the paid posters don't do many posts in the general chat areas.
- Watch out for copy and paste posts. This happens especially on the more niche forums, the posters will go to another similar forum and take threads from there.
- Ensure you get other traffic during the paid posting period, the aim of paid posting is to get non-paid members signing up and posting to get the forum going.
This is the most important, without this you will just have extra posts in your forum unless this is just to seed the forum and you are planning on having another round of paid posting when you try and attract traffic.
Remember empty forums don't get new members, neither will forums full of junk
