Today I am going to talk about paid forum posting services and paid forum posters as a means to kick start a new forum or to bring life to an old forgotten one.

Any one who has been involved with running or developing forums knows how crucial first couple of months are, one is not only involved in promoting the forum and tweaking and optimizing it, but as an admin you have to do most of the posting as well.

While friends and family are usually there to help you out, chances are they aren’t as well versed in the topic as you are. This leaves you with the choice of roughing it out for few months by being the person who posts majority of the topics or you can go out and seek help of professional forum posting services or paid posters.

While paying for posts might seem like a bad idea to few, believe me it does work.

Paid posting can abuzz your forum with activity till you get normal posters through your marketing efforts (click here to read how posting in other forums can bring you quality traffic). When people do start trickling to your forums and see others posting and find topics of their interest, chances are they will join in and start posting as well. While if your forum is all but empty, they will be reluctant to join it.

However finding paid posters/services and throwing money at them and hoping your forum would turn out to be a great success without your active involvement is just a wishful thinking and should be avoided at all cost.

When you go out and hire paid posting service/posters, you need to ensure that they not only do their job properly and in a timely manner, you also need to become an active participant and get involved closely with every thing.

Here are few tips to get you up to speed with paid posting and how you can utilize them to their full potential.

Work with the posters: Even though you are paying people to post at your forums, don’t forget it is your forum and they are here only temporarily. So make the most of it while they are there and engage them in topics and try to build conversations to make it interesting for a person reading the topic at a later stage. Remember forums are not about topics with single post, they are there to facilitate a flow of conversation between different individuals.

This is one aspect which I find missing in some of the forums that hire paid posting services. Their intent is to get as many topics created as possible, to make their forums look “populated”. However empty topics can backfire easily, as they make the forum appear as lacking activity.

This brings us to the second tip of the day:

Hire multiple posters: Whether you hire individual posters or hire a paid posting service, please ensure that you get at least 3 individual posters, rather than one poster creating all the posts and topics. Ensure at any given day when you are getting paid posting done, there are at least couple of individuals doing the posting. This would give an impression to a guest that a conversation is taking place and people are presenting their point of view, at which point he/she might want to make their voice heard.

Set guidelines based on your forums theme: In almost every paid posting job advertised at Digital Point or other freelancing forums, it is mentioned that posters must use proper English rather than sms lingo or slang. However this is not a hard fast rule and it really depends on theme of your forum.

After all what appears natural; three surfers at a beach sitting in a chair, drinking tea and talking in proper English or three surfer standing with their surf boards with cokes/beers in their hands and using surfer slang?

Ask posters to post in a manner which matches the theme of your forum. Also it might be a good idea to set 15-20 words as bear minimum they should write in every post and maybe in a few posts go down to 5-10 words so as to make the entire conversation appear natural. Also it might be a good idea to ask posters to do a specific percentage of the posting as topics to ensure more opportunity is created for people to have conversations at.

Check quality of the posts: It might be a good idea to ask the paid poster to furnish his previous experience to check his/her posting style, else you can always hire them on a trial basis (for 5-10 posts) and if you are satisfied with their quality let them write more posts, else find some one else.

These are just few of the things that should ensure that you are able to make the most out of what you are paying for.

At this point you might be wondering where the list of paid posting service is, well I am not going to recommend one at this stage and would instead recommend you to scour through forums such as Digital Point’s Content Creation Section for paid posting services and individual paid posters. Another place worth looking at would be Admin Fusion’s Paid Posting and Content section.

Let me know how you find the tips above and you experience with paid posting services.

Have fun…