I recently discovered how this really works, with the most effective companies that are involved with paid posting, and the whole thing is quite scary.
1. They require their paid posters to be well established on the forums in which they make paid posts first, with a minimum number of 500 unpaid posts to their credit. This is to establish trust among the forum membership and lessen suspicion that they could be engaged in paid posting.
3. Paid posters must maintain a high ratio of unpaid posts to paid posts.
4. Paid posters must write original unique posts that are not duplicated, elsewhere.
5. They are only allowed to be paid once for an advertiser, and are forbidden from making a second post on another forum for that same product.
6. The forums they post on must be PR4 or higher and quite active.
The perfect candidates are people that have been long time members of a busy forum, and are trusted and respected by most of the members, and know what will and won't fit into the forum. They know the members of the forum quite well and the members know them. They are the ones that would never be suspected.
Take a look at the
top 10 posters on this forum. All of them would be perfect candidates for this type of paid posting, here. And if any of them did it, you probably wouldn't know it.
If we had one among us, they could easily post about an application "find" and start a software discussion about it. Or they could easily post in the living room about some "cool site" they discovered, directing traffic to it. Or post in the company compliments & complaints section, with something nice to say about some company. It's also likely that it would end up promoted to the
blog.
If any of the top 10 posters in this forum was to do any of those things, we would never know if they were paid for it or not, would we? Could we ever be sure? We all make posts like that all the time here, don't we?
The ad companies that charge the most and pay the posters the highest, and offer the most effective advertising for your money, all work like this.
They don't send someone to a forum and pay them to sign up and make a post and say great stuff about some product, site, or service, on the first post. The companies offering that kind of spam advertising services are cheap and ineffective and nobody really wants to make posts for them or hire them to spread the word about their product, site, or service.
It's the good ad companies that are capable of pulling the wool over our eyes and the only choice we have is to either keep trusting who we already trust and try not to think about it, or look at everyone with suspicion each time we read a post on
any forum made by someone with 500 or more posts to their credit.
I told you it was scary.
DISCLAIMER: Since I have more than 500 posts here and am also on the top 10 list, I feel the need to state that while I may have done some things during the course of my life that I am not proud of, paid posting isn't one of them. I would rather be homeless and starve to death than sell my integrity, and I do not engage in any type of paid posting, here or anywhere else.
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