I'm curious as to what experiences some of you have had with forum posting/moderating service. If you start a forum with almost no involvement on your own part, do they help your community take off? If so, which ones are good and how much did you guys pay? Thanks.
I've never paid for posts, so I'm not sure whether or not my opinion is relevant to you, but I'm going to give my 0.02 anyways! The paid posts companies...I think that the majority of these are run by teenagers who are hoping to make easy money off other people's work. When in reality, they find that there is much more involved. I joined two of these services as a poster/employee to see how they worked on the inside, and I was quite appalled. Both services I joined (I will not mention names) were quite unorganized, did not encourage quality posts, and most important of all, did not hire qualified writers. I saw people getting assigned to jobs who had little to no knowledge on the topic. Hopefully nobody here takes serious offense to that...it is me generalizing, I'm sure it isnt the case with all of these companies. With that said, even if you do pay and receive semi-quality posts, I think your money is better spent elsewhere. Spend it on advertising, spend it running your own promotions. Paying for posts is only temporary, if you spend that money elsewhere which will bring people in who find you on their own and actually care about your forums (not people getting paid to come), your forums will be better off in the long run.
Personally, I don't think it's realistic to be able to expert to run a successful forum without taking an active role yourself. Aaron
I agree with you there - most are run by teenagers and assign writers in an unorganised and unprofessional way. However as I always say, don't generalise, because we aren't all like that. I'm in my mid-20's and I certainly don't hire people willy nilly.
I think I have used every company here and have not been happy with one yet. I think there is just no such thing as good forum posters.
forumbulge, you could be 100% correct, and if so, more power to you. I'm just stating that I have looked inside of a whole lot of these posting services and that is the conclusion I came up with. Shoemoney, of course there is such thing as a good forum poster, it's a paid forum poster that is harder to come by
My opinion: If you need to pay people to post on your forum, perhaps you should seriously thinking about dumping the forum and putting your energies elsewhere. In the forum world, as well as other aspects of the internet, people are ay too focused on the short term and the quick buck. Look to the long term, whether it's forum building or general site promotion, and build slowly and legitmately toward those long-term goals.
yup i think thats why paying people to post in forums just does not work. I have honestly tried several different companies on several different forums and the posts are pretty easy to spot and I end up deleting most of them anyway.
Yes I agree... even you pay for forum poster if you are not active and knowledgeable to your forum, the chance to become successful is very low. Those paid to post individual will leave the forum when you don't pay them any more.
I disagree... every forum I have started out this way without any interaction from me at all... then usually I will notice or get emailed from a user who is "reporting" spam so I will make them a moderator. I pay moderators too generally not much its usually a per post basis. I have several forums with membership over 50k and some over 250k They all started out as a circus.
What are you disagreeing WITH exactly, Shoe? and by the way get over to your newest forum and answer some damn questions
Oh. I think that depends on the type of forum, the members, and how good the moderators are. But your shoemoney forum needs SOME attention - get your ass in there
Yes, but its more like a kick start in your forum, ya they will leave, but most certainly, guests would not join a forum with no posts. I run one, I have gotten help from a lot of people, that I know in real life. And I don't just hire people that are unproffesional, I got a lot of applications and only about half of them made it. Some have excellent quality posts, but they only have about 1 interest. And some have good posts, and a lot of interests, but they tell me that they're doing this for the money because they really need it, well most writers do it for money, but I would want to hire writers that love to post.
If you need to pay people to post on your forum, perhaps you should seriously thinking about dumping the forum and putting your energies elsewhere.
To those who have used them successfully: how long did you use them and how much did you spent until the forum ran the way you wanted it to?
I think hiring a site to post is a better option then freely allowing users to signup post and get $$ this cuts down spam and improves the quality of the posts within your forum.
Then again, you're not entirely unbiased, are you Morgan? Fraud-you-lent.com -- "Let us deceive your future forum members by pretending we actually care about your forum or what we're posting here."