Forum Boosting - Can You Really Earn Money?

You might have heard about people getting paid to post in website forums. You might have wondered if this is a real job that people actually get paid for. The answer is yes. But is it as easy as it sounds?

It all started when I first came online, I was desperately searching for ways to make money (I need thousands of dollars for braces for my oldest daughter). I was determined that I could somehow make money from home. I hadn't even heard about blogging yet.

I'm a freelance writer so in between writing jobs I wanted a bit of a steady pay check. This was when I first heard of paid forum posters or forum boosters. This sounded easy, a piece of cake! They didn't pay much, somewhere around 15 cents a post. Okay, crappy pay, but still being the optimist that I am, I imagined those posts adding up.

So I went for it, I actually had to fill out an application and perform a writing test to prove my writing ability. After a week or so I heard back that I was indeed hired on as a "Forum Booster." But aside from the lousy pay there were a few things that I had never considered until after I was already doing the job.

1) You have to register at every forum that you are assigned to post on. That's a lot of time spent filling out registrations, waiting for emails back, etc. As a forum booster you can only choose one user name. You will not get paid if you use any other name when registering. So if someone has registered at a website with your user name it causes problems. Are you getting paid for all of this hassle? No!

2) You can't just make a post saying "Hi, I'm from Canada." No, they want you to make thought provoking posts that will start or add to discussions on the forums, there is also a specified number of words you are to use, if I remember correctly it was twenty. That's a whole lot of thinking for 15 cents a post.

3) In order to make a weekly part time (forget full time) pay check you have to sign up to post on all of the forums that you can. Which means writing about sports, nutrition, and in one case, constipation. No, I'm not kidding.

After two weeks of working full time for part time pay and nearly frying my brain trying to come up with interesting things to say. I grabbed my pay check and quit. But wait, it turns out that I wasn't even paid for every post that I'd completed. (I had been keeping track).

They had underpaid me by $25.00. Why, I have no idea. I only made $140 for two weeks (full time hours). Should I have tried to fight for my money? Yes, but at this point I just really wanted to get out of there and never look back, and I haven't, well, not until now at least.