My experience of paid posters posting on my forum

Given my experiences as a poster and other paid posters I had worked with I have to expect I was not expecting much, although I will say I was quite impressed with the results.

I didn’t follow the rules I had suggested purely so I would get the best or worst paid posting had to offer.

What were the results

Well as expected I had several posters who were utterly clueless, most were lacking in basic English skills, however the rest had a mixture of good subject knowledge and good English skills often both.  My partner often had to ask who were the paid posters and who weren't, although they did pick out several of them straight away.

What were the problems with the bad posters?

Mostly it was to do with the quality of their English, however if the posters have a good knowledge of the subject bad quality English isn't such a problem.  However often the bad English came hand in hand with no knowledge of the subject matter as well, however the reverse can also be true, good English but clueless about the subject matter.

Other posters didn't follow the basic instructions I had given for the job, which were basically concentrate posts in two of the forum areas, however at least 2 of the posters just posted "Hi there" type posts in either general chat or introduction areas of the forum.  To give the owner of the paid posting service their due I don't think either of those posters are working for the company any more.

What could I have done differently?

As I said earlier I didn't try and follow most of the rules I suggested, following those would certainly have helped.

Roughly I wasted around 10-15% of my budget on poor quality posts that would have harmed the forums reputation rather than increase it, although had I had followed my suggestions I would have complained straight away to the paid posting company and gotten those users removed and replaced.

I think the main think I learned was not specifying the job properly in the first place, where as had I specified exactly what kind of posts I wanted posting what forums to post in.  That lack of specifics perhaps cost me around another 5% of budget.

Overall was I happy?

Actually I think I was, weeding out the bad posts earlier would have made a bigger difference however surprisingly I seemingly got better results on my own forum that others that I had worked on.  Perhaps it was because I was an active participant I dont know.

I'm more than likely going to re-order now the forum has posts in it, and this time advertise the forum while I do it to try and get new non-paid members.