Are "Pay me to post on your forums" worth it?

[AnnaS]

I do not know how long these service offerings have been around. I just ran into one a few weeks back for the first time. It was intereting to think as a service offering, and some of the prices seem cheap enough to entice you in.

Seeding posts into a forum does help encourage participation, but I wonder how a regular new visitor toa community feels about MaryXXX coming in, making 20 or 50 posts over a few days then disappearing.

I know the general forum rules such as don't start a new forum topic unless you have 15 or 25 posts for the category and if it goes stale over a few months, collapse the category. But thats about all the forum rules I know of.

Has this been debated here before, or is there a general feeling about their value?

 

[Talkhost]

If you need to pay folks to post on a forum, you don't need a forum......

 

[Olney]

The the site DP you can probably find many who do the service.
If it's a really generic site like Sports for example & they actually post about current events it might be good.
If the theme is technical, it might not work well.

 

[Mr. DeletedMr. Deleted is verified member.]

I have a forum that relates to a religious cult, and I never hired anyone to post, as the domain is generic, and am pretty high in the search engines for the term, and people type it in. I then also mass email my members from time to time to help bring them back. But that depents on the type of forum and a lot of other factors. If there are a lot of competing forums related to what you talk about, you may need to get people to think it is a popular site, but I mainly have one competitor, and he is my friend. And I am also an admin on his forum to help him out, as he is a truck driver. His forum is busier then mine.

 

[DNjet]

I have seen many compaints with these services of very lame posts from the people they hire.

 

[whydna]

If you need to pay folks to post on a forum, you don't need a forum......

Very ignorant statement. If your forum is new, who will post in it?

The services are good for new forums, or forums that are getting traffic but do not have any discussion content. It is also good for forums that have alot of lurkers, as it may interest them to post.

 

[AnnaS]

Forum lurkers - what a huge untapped potential. I find myself doing lots of open ended questions I already know the answer to or ask people to put tht out as a seperate thread to entice the lurkers out of their hiding spots.

Very ignorant statement. If your forum is new, who will post in it?

The services are good for new forums, or forums that are getting traffic but do not have any discussion content. It is also good for forums that have alot of lurkers, as it may interest them to post.

Thanks, saved me the trouble of flaming them myself. Yes you are correct, I saw this as a way to "seed" a new forum.