To give my forum a start I decided to pay for some forum posting. The quality of posts are not usually that great but it can speed up the growth of the forum. This isn’t the first time I have used this type of service to boost a forum. A few months ago I followed Chris Beasley’s advice and tried out Inb0x and PostOnMyForum.
PostOnMyForum were pretty terrible. Most posters were semi illiterate and their replies were either way too short or had nothing to do with the actual discussion. Put simply, it was a waste of money. Inb0x was a little better. There were some bad posters however the owner Carrie removed them from the job and made sure that their posts didn’t count towards the total I had bought.
For this project I decided to use ForumBooster. I read a few positive reviews and a few negative ones but they kept popping up when I was searching for paid posting so I thought I would give them a try, which turned out to be a big mistake. After 4 days they hadn’t replied to any of my emails and after that I just opened up a paypal complaint and after several days they haven’t even replied to that so it looks like paypal is going to just give me my money back.
After that I decided to post the job offer in the Digital Point Content Creation Room. Without doubt this has been the best place to find writers. Since I am in contact with writers directly, ie. no middle man, I have more control over the quality of posters. I asked if writers could post 2-3 posts to showcase their writing ability and their knowledge of the forums main topics so that I could evaluate the quality of their posts. This turned out to be very important as a few writers asked to take the job on but had little or no knowledge of gaming or technology issues, something which quickly showed in their posts.
I also spoke to Carrie at Inb0x about getting some writers on board. She was replying to all my emails but after sending $5 for a mini trial at the weekend I haven’t heard from her (here we go again!!). She’s been good in the past so I’ll give her the benefit of doubt and wait a while before I contact her again about it.
So in conclusion, most of the paid posting websites provide at the very best, average writers who have no real knowledge of the subject they are posting about and no interest to learn because all they want is to finish the job and get paid. Harsh but true however it is still a good way to get a forum started. Again, I think hiring writers directly via a forum like Digitial Point is a much better way to get good writers in.