Sure, I’m more than happy to answer your questions.
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I’ve been doing this since past 4 months. Things are going pretty smooth. Something I didn’t expect to see was “getting traffic from Google without doing any SEO”. My plan was to do some advertising to bring in users. But I never had to do that. The site is ranking for a lot of KWs and that’s bringing in lot of traffic to the site. I was getting “50+ new users” every single day “until I upgraded discourse 3-4 days ago - which broke the discourse-gate plugin that I was using”. And without the discourse-gate plugin, I’m now getting like 10 new users daily.
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My site is for students. They ask their study related doubts. And moderators are actually “college students” who joined my site “to assist the high school students with their study doubts”. And since these are “college students”, I got them for really cheap. There is a different pay for “posts” and different pay for “each solution”. (thanks to the solved plugin)
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Mods get a custom title in my site “mentors”. And the students in the site have no clue that the mods are getting paid for helping them. So far I haven’t seen anyone asking me or any of the moderators if they are getting paid to post. Also - mods do not start discussions, they just clear the doubts/queries/questions posted by the students. So, conversations are always started by the students. The mods just assist/clear their queries.
NOTE:
This approach may not work for everyone. This is working for me because:
- Mods in my site are “college students” - and they are cheap.
- Its an aged domain with tons of backlinks. The old site was a “discussion site” too. So, without doing any SEO, it immediately started ranking. (thanks to Discourse too, wouldn’t have been possible without Discourse)