Need some opinions- Is it a good idea to hire people to post on your forum?

I've read that some people get their forums going by asking their friends and close business associates to post. It was called "seeding" the forum.

I don't know about hiring people, but if you do, I'd make them sign a non-disclosure agreement. It might look bad if they were going around bragging that they were paid to post on your forum.

Yeah, starting a forum isn't as easy as it looks. It's the old "chicken and the egg" thing - You need members to join, but no one is signing up because the place looks deserted.

In my opinion, unless you already have a popular site with a dedicated following or you have a list of subscribers, you may struggle. Steve Pavlina is a good example: He had no problem kick-starting his forum because his blog already had a huge audience.

I have used forum posting services in the past and they are ok, but you need to keep that momentum going until you get a solid base of real members.

The way you start a forum is the same way you start a blog, become an authority first or simply the first in your field and they will come.

A good way to do it is volunteer at other forums and build up some friends, gain experience, figure out what works and doesnt work.

It is never going to be easy, but it is possible.

As Heuristic states above, having a following gives you a huge boost, I am a forum mod (former admin) having been promoted time and again from newbie poster for a large gaming forum and many have split off trying to make their own but without the trust of members you are going to struggle.

Building momentum is the hardest part...and the danger of a) hiring a boring forum poster or b) hiring a poster who will use his or her work there as part of a portfolio are offputting. I think a good solution is to try several methods including posting your own comments, using plr, posting under other names, hiring posters...scatter it around so that if a poster you hire is boring or bragging, it will just be part of the varied pattern of the forum. BTW, PM me and I can post a comment or two or three for the fun of it.

I would not create false accounts to post threads and answer them yourself, it simply looks amateurish and obvious.

Everyone has a certain cadence to their typing, little things they do almost unconsciously which others can pick up on, especially if they are used to forums and figuring out if someone is not playing within the rules. For instance, I tend to do "..." a lot, even without thinking about it and have done so for many years, people know this about me and could recognise it even if blind.

If you simply make a new forum with 100 of your own accounts to try to cheat the system people will notice, and you will ruin any reputation you ever had.

You should also not need to pay people to post on a forum, those that get paid for that do not care about them and will simply move onto the next when the admin runs out of money. You need to build loyalty in some way by giving them something of value for free at least once a week. (a forum wide competition resulting in 50% of all website profits every month for those with the most QUALITY posts nominated by others for a year until you are well established may be the way to go)

There is a guy I know who gave "forum founder" tags to 500 people who helped establish his new forum in its critical stages, basically giving them double PM, photo gallery rights and all sorts of other things for the lifetime of the forum , have you not tried this method? People always do like special and unique tags...

(Not that it worked for him since he had way too many categories with no demand to them and had a news bot on the rampage that flooded the forums with so much unqualified crap lol)

I believe you can have your forum active by having someone or people posting every day. You can hire a people to do that or simply ask your friends, colleagues or business partners to make a post. that way you save money.

One thing I should add here that is very important is to keep to the letter of your forum title and DO NOT deviate for the first 3 months beyond your main focus and a single general discussion offtopic forum if you must.

The average forum poster from experience only posts twice per day, sometimes you will obviously get more but when a forum is brand new and you only have 50-100 posters if you have hired that amount you want it to be concentrated in one area so it looks very busy.

There is nothing worse than going to a forum and seeing a ridiculous line of thousands of categories and subcategories which are barely even getting looked at and it will kill you far more efficiently than if you didn't pay your hosting bill.

When you get the traffic and there is demand for another forum build it up slowly and surely.

There are four main areas you should start with when you first open a forum:

Guides

General Discussion (related directly to your forums focus)

Questions

Marketplace / Screenshots / Feedback (dependant on area of focus) This can occupy one subforum with three separate areas until you get up and running since they are generally amongst the slowest of all forum areas.

Offtopic general discussion is optional

Everything else is purely cosmetic and without the traffic or demand for those areas you will simply shoot yourself in the foot.

If you do it properly and actually have people coming to your blog on a daily basis then that is your start-up without having to pay for paid members who will be gone in moments, there us nothing worse than having a forum of 1100 one day and 1000 of them suddenly disappear a few days later.

If the opening poster can make it so that the paid members get superceded gently by the general population it could work, but it is a big gamble and needs to be considered carefully.

If there is decent traffic being generating naturally (about 500-1000) by the blog you can make a small forum and mention that you are giving founding member tags or whatever to those that contribute in the beginning and everyone knows it is at the beginning of a forums life that you get the highest proportion of stickies being produced as the forum is at its most productive.

These in themselves are insanely brilliant marketing tools for the people who hold them because they are permanently stuck up at the top of the forum for all to see and if in a really useful subforum that everyone visits they can hold their blogs advertised in a way few can. Stickies get far more views on average than any other kind of post, until a particular person builds a reputation in their own right. Who wouldn't want masses of free advertisement for the simple fee of writing the best help topic first?

And yes, I have held the occasional sticky myself, years after forums have first started and even then they are highly prized.

This could actually be one of your main selling points to get people to post on your forums :p

Seeding the forum is ok, as long as you're not using it to deceive anyone. For example, if you intend to sell advertising space or you intend to quickly flip the forum, then you need to disclose up front to potential advertisers/buyers that X number of members are temporary (paid) members who made X number of posts.

In other words, don't let someone paying you money get mislead by your forum stats.

Cheers,
Becky

ETA: And don't deceive your members or competitors either, by doing something like posting a slogan such as, "biggest [niche] forum on the planet!" (when it's not true because several members are just temporary, paid members).

I don't think it would be a problem if you offered "incentives" for posting, or hiring people who specialize in the topic content to kick-start the forum.

A lot of people jumpstart their forums that way. Just make sure that you hire people who understand that you will only pay for quality posting ... real conversations, not one liners.

Can anyone recommend any companies that you can hire to post for you?

Here is what you need to do before you hire forum posters to be initial posters on your forum :

1. Find the problems that your community is going to solve, for example programming forum requires posters that actually have knowledge of programming. So create some questions and post them on your forum and ask these paid posters to contribute genuinely. (Make it rule that if they spam they won't get money).
2. Don't let them have signature/profile link.
3. Make a rule for them to post content with words 30+. No one liners.
4. If you are paying them for creating thread then ask them to create thread which can bring some SERP value. (Threads like what are you listening to, rate the movie, what are you doing adds no value.)
5. Never let them post duplicate content on forums( if they are copy-pasting then don't pay them).
6. Check the grammar/typos of poster. Don let them post with lots of spaces, full stop and paras without content.

Make sure you get the work done for the payment you made for those posts. If you get any quality poster who is dedicated to the work then you can hire them as moderator or monthly posting basis. Never accept posters with one liners and with poor typos/grammar, you'll waste money on them.

Thanks - I hope she sees this because it's not letting me message her directly!

There are some good posting companies but posting their link is like spamming IMO. So i suggest you to get forum posters from digital point forums, V7N forums etc. You'll find those company sales people picking orders from those forums as well.