Do Forum Posting Services Really Work?

Forum posting services are paid to create forum posts and also create new registered users to give the impression of an active forum. Forum posting services make their money from people who have stale forums or want to get new forums off the ground quickly. The question is are you exchanging short-term gain for long-term loss by using the forum posting service?

I have used form posting services in the past and I can tell you this, finding a quality service with experienced writers is the hardest task. Most forum posting services are still solo run shops that farm all writing out overseas or a small business type that has freelance writers with more turnover than a New York subway turn stile.

Compromising Forum Integrity

When using forum posting services you really don’t know what you’re paying for until you get it. Sure you get a ton of new registered users and some fresh post in your forum. But what happens when real forum users start asking questions to these new users and they never reply. In fact let’s say you’re so happy that new posts are being created that you don’t realize that nobody ever replies to anything. How long will it take before your real members become frustrated and stop coming back as well?

Someone Knows Everyone

Online communication is so easy and just a click away. Someone always knows somebody who knows someone else and guess what? If you’re a small business or reputable person online guess who is going to be talked about at the water cooler or lunch break?

The question you need to ask yourself is are you willing to stake the reputation of your business? It seems like a pretty small detail maybe even something you can overlook, but from a reputation standpoint do you really want to get caught with her hands in the cookie jar? Will your business suffer if your customer base learns that you pay for forum posts? That the people they have been responding to are fake? That you have wasted their time?

Dollar For Dollar

Let’s think about this before paying a few hundred dollars or so for forum posting services as I imagine you will use them more than once. What if you take that exact same amount of money and put it into a contest or giveaway?

Using free gifts or contest as a motivation to post is a real strategy often used by professional forum builders when launching a new forum. What if you took $500 and bought a few iPod nano’s and several prepaid iTunes cards and offered them to the first people who reached a certain number of posts?

This would do two things:

First, you take control back of the quality of content that gets posted in your forum because you can set the rules as to what qualifies as a real post. For example you can say a post must be about a new topic and at least a paragraph long, 500 words minimum. Make it be about Tutorials that teach other forum users how to do something, broken out over several posts.

Secondly, you are involving your community and giving them a vested interest with a bit of motivation. When users have questions about what contestants have posted, do you think there will be motivation to reply if it counts towards a post count and get them one step closer to winning?

Be Real Not Fake

If you start out your forum with fake users in the end most likely you’ll end up with a bunch of fake posts and a bunch of fake users. Take the time to attract and motivate real members who will be long-term contributors. Have fun with your forum members and focus on creating a great place to exchange ideas and post questions.

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