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A Desperate Form of Self-Promotion

I was browsing a forum a few days ago when I came across something I had not personally seen before. Maybe that’s because I don’t get around forums as often as I should.

I like to see what problems people are having and what questions they ask on forums and sometimes I post a reply that will hopefully help someone.

However, after what I saw yesterday I have to question whether I could be wasting my time giving away answers to forum postings. You see what I came across were a lot of requests for forum posters.

At first I thought they were looking for posters that you hang on your wall, but no they were looking for posters – people. These “posters” would be paid to pose and answers questions on the hirers own forum and to keep forum threads going for as long as possible.

Had I stumbled across a little known way to make money online ?
After all if I was answering forum posts anyway, why not get paid for doing it. But some of these hirer’s were hard task masters, requiring you post at least 100 times a week.

Now there’s no way I could keep up 100 posts a week and still write the intelligent considered replies that I like to think I do on forums.

But then Oh! My hopes of making loads of cash were dashed when I discovered to my horror I would earn just 10cents ($0.1) for every post.

Now that may be good money in some parts of the world but where I live that wouldn’t buy you much of anything.

But what really got me thinking was how many questions have I answered in the past, come from paid forum posters who are not interested in the reply anyway ?

And why would someone pay to have postings on their own forum or someone else’s ? Is this some form of desperate self-promotion or a secret new way that all online marketers should be using that I didn’t know about

It will make me think twice about posting replies on Forums in the future.

Tony Simpson
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