I remember I added the moderators when my forum started being busy. And I had to cut out a lot on the spam. And that time I managed to add some staff on the forum. However in case of the blog that can be different. You may notice that here spam is taken care of and other things can be automated. And most of the time you are left with content creation and promotion tasks where you need the most help. But we don't know when we need the staff for and at what time on blog.
How do you find out the right time to hire the staff for your blog?
You need to ask yourself.. can you handle the workload?
If you don't know how to build a website, you'll get someone to do that.
If you don't know how to promote / market, you'll hire someone to do that.
And it goes on.
If you need someone to contribute to a part of your project, you should hire them to do it.
I also understand that some people hire people just to contribute to part of the activity to get their forum kickstarted. I've seen it happen many times and in some cases, it works out.
If you can't handle everything yourself. Hire someone. Annoying trolls? Hire someone. A big user-base but people posting inappropriate stuff and can't be seen. Hire someone.
It mainly comes down to your user-base/readers, un-kind people and workload.
I think you need to be at least making a little bit of money in case you need to pay a moderator. Some of the more active community members may love the honor or being a moderator but I think one who invests a lot of time will want a little bit of the profits.
Ask yourself the following and then make an informed decision when considering the following factors
- Can you handle moderation by yourself?
- Can you code, develop and maintain a website or do you need to hire a developer?
- Can you cope with marketing your blog
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then yes you do need to employ staff or volunteers to support you.
But I think it's a waste of money to hire someone if you cannot monetize your blog. So you really need to gain some traction and establish as yourself independently first.
Blogs was always a difficult one for me in terms of knowing when to take next steps. It's not as 'obvious' as a forum in some respects, for me anyway. I ran a technology news blog and we only started hiring writers about a year before we actually ended the site as our personal life commitments just got too hectic (but that netted us a tidy sum so hey ho). We started hiring because we offered paid product placements (In the form of reviews) and so we needed two other people to cover the general news side of things. Worked out well for a while actually.