Having just launched a website for a client about Scuba and Deep Sea Diving I was soon to be dropped in the deep end my self as I was asked to Launch and Promote a Chat Forum for the site! At first I thought this is an interesting project for me to take on, how wrong I was! I would normally start off by creating several forum identities and then start talking to myself to create some atmosphere and then sit back once genuine forum posters started to populate the forum.
My personal niche of authority is weight loss and having launched over 20 diet/fitness websites in the last 2 years you can safely say I can produce weight loss related content on the fly without a problem, but this was a whole new ball game 
I would normally post around 50/60 messages to myself when starting to get a forum started and then sit back but on this site I just drew a mental blank, I posted around 5 posts under 3 accounts and then couldnt come up with anything else, I literaly couldnt think , it’s one of those niches you need to be in to write about imho, and no amount of Google’ing was about to make me an authority!
I tried to generate interest for the site on other similar related forums which ended pretty quickly as soon as the site admin’s noticed the link in my signature to my forums so starting to think failure I was pretty much out of ideas until the penny dropped! Would it be possible to pay someone a small fee to write this content? But not just one person lots and lots of people! I started to search the net looking for some outsourcing agencies that fitted my needs which none did because they where all geared up towards larger projects, I didnt want 1 person to do 40 hours work I wanted 40 people to do 1 hours work!
I then found “Short Task” a website dedicated to short, small outsourcing tasks! They have literally thousands of members who work from home and within 3 hours had over 20 forums posts by 15 different members 
All well written sensible posts that fitted the site niche perfectly! Within 1 week the forum had over 250 posts and had started attracting real visitors who then started to contribute to the forums as well.
Short Task was the perfect solution and worked out very cheap at under $80 total cost! The client was equally happy also. (whats more a couple of those posters still post on the forum to this day because they are genuinely interested in Deep Sea Diving!)
