Alrite as many of you (or you may not know) I regged forumburst.com. I was considering selling it, but some great advice here told me to at least post content or run a business through and then sell it. So who has done this before? What are some tips you have? How much time does this take? Can one guy do it? Regards, Skinny
I would suggest first setting up the plans and getting traffic, also contact some freelancers and test their service before letting them work on a client's forum. When you do make a sale just contact those freelancers and give them the instructions.
I ran two companies before selling. And to also let you know that there are about 48 - 50 known paid posting services out there as well. For tips or you can read up on some articles relating to your question on my site Paid Post Help and Info. You can run this site as a freelance paid posting service. There are a handful of them out there. And once you start getting to many orders you can start to hire. If you have been working in the paid posting service you may recognize some of the people that want to be hired from previous work they have done with you. I found many paid posters work for about 3 - 5 forums if not more. Some will be more dedicated and loyal and stick to just one. As far as how many hours you will spend. I would say after the dust has settled, about 1 hour or less a day. To review applications, to to advertise, to look for work, poster payouts. Could I also suggest that in due time you find yourself adding more features to your service, such as hosting, moderator services, article writing, graphics work and so on. So find your niche and be prepared to grow. May I suggest you read the articles in my forum to help you out: 5 things you should look for with a Paid Posting Tutorial On Running/Starting A Paid Posting Service So what kind of poster are you? What kind of forum owner are you? Also go through the paid posting listing I have in the forum. View the sites and see how they set things up. Compare prices. Find your edge and what unique things that you may offer to the paid posting service. Find things that you can improve on that others dont have or lack in. I would say that some of the important things to remember in running the service would be: 1. Customer Service. Reply to emails and questions any one client has. 2. Dont give out stuff you cant deliver on. If unsure if your posters can deliver 1000 posts in 4 days(which I have had forum owners request). Know if you can do it. Know your limits and the limits of your posters. 3. Be firm in your sample posting. Dont give out more than 10 sample posts. be firm about this. You are running a business. Forum owners/clients need to respect who you are and what you can provide for them. 4. Check in on your posters. Make sure their posts remain in quality forum and word content/count. You may have to fire a few posters for plagerism, not original content, writing skills not up to par and so on 5. Have a solid Terms of Service(TOS) and stick to it. What would your refund policy be if ever requested.
Yea it's a lot tougher than it looks. Thanks a lot for the info. I know that Customer Service is BIG on the net. People often don't get it. Hmm, I might have to cut back on the plans I have set. haha 5000 posts in a week. You are right I'll need to work my way up or hire people. I will read your links. Thanks To everyone else if you have tips send them in. Skinny
Well you should start regardless. Just start small and build your way up. I know many services had 1 - 5 posters at the start. Than hired up to over 100 posters. Btw not all 100 posters are active at every service either. Start small and build your way up. Offer packages up to about 500 posts. I found in my experience that many have asked for from 200 posts up to 500. Some, but seldomly asked for 1000 posts.
There are some people provide these kind of service for posting for your forum and you will gett some idea of how it works, but general feeling is that you need to have a good topic and few interested people start the discussion first, then try to get the traffic in from marketing or SEO, then grow from that. My experience is that it is quite difficult to start a community and it takes time.