Paid Posting?

[luke175]

I was browsing another forum and saw someone advertising payment for people to go and post on his forum. He was offering payment per post with a maximum number and other criteria. Many posters responded with interest.

Has anyone done this before? I have a new forum that is getting about 400-1000 visitors a day and almost no posts on it. Obviously it is because there is nothing being discussed so people just leave.

If anyone has any ideas on this or has done it I would love to hear if it worked.

Also, does anyone know of any formal services that specialize in something like this?

[Webwork]

Ya, this very subject has recently been aired in this forum. Dig down a few pages in the threads. I think you'll find more than one thread on point.

[rogerd]

Luke, you are getting some decent traffic - now you just need to get people posting. Check this thread from the library: Pulling forum lurkers out of hiding [webmasterworld.com].

[luke175]

After some consideration, I have implemented some new techniques and I would also like to possible pay some people to make some postings to possibly jumpstart the forum.

Anyone know if such a service exists?

[rogerd]

I've never heard of a formal service for that, although you could probably go to a freelance site like elance or rentacoder for some quotes - people looking for content creation work could also do forum postings.

As a better alternative, consider identifying a few good posters in your forum now and see if you can work out an incentive plan - you'll be familiar with their work, they are already on the site and respected... multiple good reasons to go that route. Of course, once you start adding incentives, quality could decline.

[GordonS]

How would you actually pay them? Via PayPal, or some other method?

And what are the criteria that would qualify a posting for payment?

[Eltiti]

Looks like you have found a potential poster already! ;-)

[spaceylacie]

Paying for posts is one way to do it, but I got my first forum started a different way. Now, they are chatting away.

I don't know if this has been covered before, but I started my forum sort of as a blog. I just started posting bits and pieces of information I knew about the subject and let people start ask questions. I sort of cheated because I knew ahead of time what kinds of questions people were asking via email, before the forum was started.

Since I didn't really have time to answer their individual questions, one at a time, I started posting parts of the answers in the forum section. Then, just waited for them to start asking for more info.

[webzilla]

You could set up a few dummy usernames and post yourself under different personas, and get a bit of lively banter going to draw others into the fray.

[Thieu_iot]

When I had income from Google Adsense, I used to pay some members for their good posts. It's quite small sums but they were elated. Then the site's content became more and more interesting. Now I cannot continue since Google disabling my Adsense account but I hope the program will be renewed.

[trillianjedi]

I just started posting bits and pieces of information I knew about the subject and let people start ask questions.

That's what I have always done, and it's never failed.

A new forum should be treated like your own blog, but one that the public can join and respond to.

In reality, it's just a form of CMS. You need to provide the initial content.

TJ