Can your forum survive without post exchanges?

Possibly. It depends.

A lot of my friends come from another forum I was on which has pretty much died; so that's about twenty people. Then I have some old internet friends, real life friends etc who have joined; that's another twenty or thirty.

Post exchanges have helped make us look more "popular", but not by a significant amount. I guess it's a really good thing to do if you don't have any friends/family interested in joining, but for me it's more of an enhancement.

 

If postloop is used here, then this may be the cause of the flood of low quality content that I am witnessing here lately. Its really nice that the activity is up substantially and also see an increase of interesting topics, but it makes it harder to wade through the useless contributions. Which makes it less fun to use this site. I noticed that for some days I tended not to visit here for this reason.

I can see how services like postloop would be interesting for new websites with a general topic.

 

The problem with post loop is you get the content/increase in activity, but not the user-base. 99% of people won't stick around if there's no points to be gained. It's unfortunate, but it's still beneficial for new forums which have no other way of generating content. For me it's more of an "enhancement", because I already have a lot of active users that have arrived through word-of-mouth.

 

Hmm yes, I think my forum could survive without post exchanges.
Since my forum is new, there wouldn't be much happening with my forum, the users posting would make useless posts.
But if I didn't do post exchanges, i have a few online friends which could help me out in building a solid enough forum with good content to get it started off.

 

I think that unless your going to Create multiple Accounts yourself and Talk to yourself, especially if you have no friends or family who will join in to help you start the community off then it's the only way to get a Forum started these days.

If you did start to get Organic Traffic to your Forum and it was empty with no threads or posts, then that person isn't going to stick around, they'll just find another with more activity. So your hard work on getting visitors to your forums in the first place will be useless as you have no content there for them to join in with. It's like having a Blog with no articles.

Post Exchanges are great to start up initially, but you have to make sure that you don't get addicted to it otherwise that's all your forum will be, you need to go out into the world wide web and get some 'real' members after.

 

Postloop works wonders for my community when I use. We usually see 200-250 posts a day when I turn on postloop and add points. I also do post exchanges from time to time when I'm trying to reach a certain post count on my community. Like all this week, I wanted to hit 204k posts, so I did a lot of post exchanges and used postloop to help us out. It worked because yesterday, we hit 204k posts.

 

I rarely ever do post exchanges. I've only ever done it with @cpvr a few times.
So yeah you can, it really depends on the community you have. Though i am open to exchanges if someone asks me and i am interested in their site.
i was asked once by some guy and i am like "dude...i don't know crap about cars" LOL, what would i post about ha

 

Reminds me of when someone asked me to do a post exchange with their Hunger games forum on ForumPromotion. I don't know anything about the hunger games, so I had to refuse the exchange. I'm usually very opened with my exchanges.

 

But, you've got to change your writing style for different "personas" and you have to remember what each persona is like, it has to be a unique believable "person" or it won't work. I think it takes talent to pull that off well.

 

You can't pull it off really unless your running around copying content from other sites that use a different style of writing you have. We all have our quirks in how we write that gives you away when writing your own content using fake members. People spot it, the way you write and how you might use certain words too much, excessive punctuation in wrong places, or your bad spelling. Or writing as an American using English/UK words for certain things an American wouldn't spell it like e.t.c

The biggest give-away is too many short one line replies in topics, people trying to hide their writing style by posting very short replies, or they can't think what to reply with and post 4-6 words to add some quick content. They all mount up and it starts becoming obvious as proper posters don't generally post one line relies all the time.

 

I'm actually against making multiple accounts to boast your forum's stats. What if your members find out you're using two accounts?

 

Ive never used either.... I think I've done ok...

 

Nice forum! You got a decent amount of members. Post exchanges would still help give your forum a boost though with some new content. Especially if you're receiving quality content in return. It depends on the post exchanger, some of them like to make longer posts.

However, with that being said I've stopped using post exchanges, because I thought of a few other ways to promote my forum that are more time efficient.

 

Well growing and surviving are two different things.
Survive: Yes
Grow: Possible, but not in activity or stuff. I know forums that do not post anything except by one or two people a day, but they still make money off premium subscriptions and such.

 

Post exchange work to kick start a new forum, but sustaining it with capital is the major problem.