My Experiences

I started paid forum posting not because I need the money, my day job as a computer programmer pays me enough (although don't tell my employers that :-)) but I was bored. I like posting on forums however I rarely have any motivation to.

I thought that getting paid for it would be a good way to keep me interested.  Due to the nature of paid posting jobs you are never on one forum too long so it gave me a varied set of forums to post on.

Posting

The idea of paid forum posting is easy from a posters point of view.  Get a job, the company I was working for you did this by picking your own jobs from their control panel.  Once you were assigned to a job you signed up to the forum and posted away.   The jobs tend to be structured by the number of new threads and number of replies you post.

I was picky about what kind of jobs I did but it quickly became apparent that most of the posters weren't.  The quality of those posting from the same company was very variable from those who could barely string an English sentence together to those who were just in it for the money.

Posters just in it for the money?

Quite a few of my fellow paid posters just weren't worth the money they were being paid, most of them ticked most of the problems I found with posters below on a regular basis.

• A large number of posts every day
• Posts that added nothing to the thread being discussed, often just a repetition of what had been said above without the detail
• Short posts.  This company had a minimum word count for posts, partly to cut down on the "Me Too" posts but a longer post should have more SEO value than a short one.  Quite a few posters often posted shorter than the minimum.
• Contradicting posts, for instance one posting asking for advice in one post on why their broadband supplier was rubbish, and in another post (On the same day) why their broadband supplier (a different supplier) was wonderful.
• Cut and pasted posts from other forums they were working on, and not always their own.
• Little or no subject knowledge.  Posts would contain wildly inaccurate information
• Jumping on to a job because its open not because they could add value.

Were there any good posters?

Certainly there was, however most of the good posters would get drowned out by the dross.  On the rare occasion I had a posting job with mostly good posters it was a complete pleasure.  It wasn't always the posters knew their subject matter, but they did know how to have a useful conversation on any topic.

Forum owners not mucking in

The particular company I was working for would give you a list of which posters were paid posters.  In the majority of my jobs the the people on that list would be the only posters.  I would imagine that the person that created the forum would know their subject and would be interested in promoting their own forum. I was shocked, these people are paying money to have their forum filled and they don't seem to be keeping an eye on what's going on.