I need some help getting my forum up and running; will hiring a few forum posters help get it some traffic? Where can I find good forum posters? My site is a biotechnology site, including artificial intelligence and nanotechnology.

Thank you!

Not exactly a subject that will have hordes of people beating a path to your forum is it and hardly something that the generic "forum posters" are going to know much about.

Even if the forum topic were within the domain of common knowledge you'd most likely be paying for the junk we delete here on a daily basis.

It might be funny to see what nonsense the paid posters come up with when the topic is something like AI.

Aww you guys dashed my hopes!

I guess that's the Catch-22: Try and make a real site with unique content, but few people are interested. Or you can make a site like everyone else but have enormous competition?

If it is a topic that YOU know enough about to provide USEFUL content for then it isn't really a problem.

But a forum on what is a true niche topic, when there is already going to be some authoratitive and well established discussion boards?

What is your board going to provide as a USP?
Do you already have a wealth of knowledge in the bio-tech and A.I. fields of expertise to share?
Or is it simply a "high paying keyword" exercise?

There is no problem in finding paid forum posters. Just create a project on a freelence site. But you should plan and schedule the main topics, threads and discussions yourself or someone from your team should do it. That's a normal thing for every forum to start. Your forum should look visited and have interesting discussions on the subject before ordinary people coming to your website from somewhere else would use it. Make the best forum in your niche - only in this case you will have regular non-paid posters.

And you really think the usual army of disinterested drones who make up the "data entry workers" and "paid posters" are going to be clued up on bio technology and artificial intelligence and therefore capable of making incisive posts on the topic??

Originally Posted by cupoftea

Aww you guys dashed my hopes!

Or helping you save your money,

Originally Posted by cupoftea

I guess that's the Catch-22: Try and make a real site with unique content, but few people are interested.

What do you mean by "but few people are interested"?

Originally Posted by cupoftea

Or you can make a site like everyone else but have enormous competition?

A question you should ask yourself is - why am I creating a forum?

Not really a niche that you can create original threads of discussion over a night of research(if the posters even cared to do that). Typical forums I've seen always have "The Man" for every section in a forum, it'd be tough if there'll be none for your forum, more so that it'll be made from the ground up.

Search webmaster forums for people who would post in exchange for money or in exchange for forum posts from you. Publish some adverts as well, on classifieds such as Craigslist.

Yes, Craigslist is filled with unemployed and desperate AI specialists

cupoftea - where do you find people with an interest and some knowledge of these areas, a computer habit and a desire to be heard? Universities. Try contacting a few departments and offering paid short holiday jobs or even inviting PhD students to guide topics.

Cupoftea did you think this through before you decided to create and put this forum up? What I mean is what was your original purpose of putting it up? What did you hope to accomplish with it? Who was your target audience? Its not as if this is a mainstream topic, its esoteric so it begs the question Why create a forum specific to this subject?


If you're doing it in the hope of making money through... say ads on the site thats fine but you should think about how will you get quality traffic there?

If you want to help people understand more about it thats good too so then what better audience could you have then students who are studying the subject. I think Paul has an excellent idea. It would appeal to that group and they will bring their opinions, knowledge, etc., to the forum. And you should continue to plan ways to draw more interest from other group types as well.

You can start it with your friends and co-workers, then promote it to others. start improving your forum design to catch forum poster's attention.

In order to lure in people, you'll need content. If you hire the right people, it will help your forum.

You can find good content editors in most admin forums. Some work for around ~10 cents/post and actually do a good job. Just take a look at some offers there, see their profiles on the site and do some testing posts (for 1 dollar or so). From the editors you work with, choose the best ones to continue posting on your forums. You can also use postloop.com

You can try looking people to hire in oDesk or elance or freelancer.

Hiring forum posters will not bring you some traffic, it will only feed more content to your forum. What you can do is add your websites to directories, blogs and other bookmarking sites.