Paid posting.

[Jerlene]

Do you buy posts to make your forum look active?

Personally I try to stay away from this method because it could come off as shady to genuine guests. They see it's active for a few days then all of a sudden it becomes unibomber quite.

[IncomeCentral]

[GTFC10]

I see lots of people offering money to make their forums active. I think it can be a good thing but overall people who post for the money are less likely to come back.

[Jerlene]

Yah but if it looks busy they could get natural members.

[redondoalvaro]

i think it is a useful method because some of the paid poster gets attached to the forum, and came back again,
Also your forum has more posts, and then you can rank higher in google, since you have a lot of content and even receive traffic for some keywords, you will be amazed that some threads rank number 1 for some general keywords.
Also it is the best way to start and build up a forum .

[mharrisr]

If you make a forum paid posting number of members will not grow as in free posting. So only rarest paid post forums are there in the net.

[Jerlene]

A lot of forums start off this way now. It's just to get it started. It'd be sad if you had to stick with it or resort back to it in the future especially after activity.

[waffles]

I've noticed this trend a lot recently, and I have mixed feelings about it from a visitors standpoint. Obviously you don't want people who post on the forum for free to find out that other people are being paid. And it can look weird when someone comes in a posts a lot and all of a sudden they're never there anymore. But it's hard to get a forum started and sometimes you just need someone to populate the board.

[gladiator]

For a start up forum, there must be away to attract members. One way is providing incentives which can be in monetayr form. However, the provision of incentives should not be a one shot deal so that posters will continue to be active in your forum.

[ashish1987]

I think paid posting mostly fills up the forum with spams.
If you are hiring a paid poster you must keep strict conditions and make sure the poster abides by them.
A better option is to spend more time and make a few more usernames and post under them and also reply to your own threads.

[khulja]

I agree with most of you. Paid posters is a good start for a forum. It gives the sence of a forum being active. The posters does not get very much anyway. It's very important that you have moderators and paid posters on your site when it comes to a paid forum.

You talk of problems with spam, but I'we seen a lot of paid forums where there's almost no spam because of good moderator work and strict rules for the posters.

I have tested it out myself with a paid to post forum, and I think it's brilliant really. It works really good. It's amazing what people are willing to do for just a few cents...