It an take months ... just don't give up and you'll succeed. The trick is to always respond ASAP anytime someone does come to the site ... even if it's just one person, chat with them on the site every single day. They won't care that the rest of the site is empty as long as they're getting what THEY came for - someone to talk to and help them out and answer their questions. That's what turns lurkers into members who are willing to stick around until the site starts to pick up ... and the type of people who will tell their friends.

HI ,
It can take from 1-3 months accourding on what do you already have in you forums and what you can provied to the members and also an important thing you should think about i "what special thing do you give for you members" and don't rush your self first look around into others froums with the same idea of yours and see what they got then spend more effort on what you can give and how to stay updated to your stuff and make a realy good adversiting plan to your forum and try to be freindly with competents and it is not a bad idea to co-work with them on something for both forums .
plus to what miss cscgal just said be more freindly with users and help them ASAP cuz when i get that kind of attention i stick in that place :d,
hope i helped
and GOOD lUCK

how about hiring paid forum posters?

You can
But what is the real benifit do you get from it ?
then it might be without meaning specialy this will give you just stuff copied into your forums
and you kan find it in other forums so where is your own stuff?

its accourding how you work on your forum, and how much other active members works.
If the visitor came in your forum and find what he/she was looking for or ask any quesiton and get the answer quickly he/she will be glad and enjoy your forum anytime its possible

It can take a very long time to build traffic. It will more time to build than a normal website. getting the forum as a website to rank high on search engines and drive traffic in itself be a tough task although it can be achieved with patience and hard work. Generating traffic will not mean that all will become members ad begin to contribute in the forum so you will need a lot of extra traffic than making a website succeed.

I've heard very mixed opinions about hiring paid posters. Often times, the posts are very low quality and spammy, so you have to be careful if you go that route and choose a company from a personal recommendation.

Hiring paid forum posters seems to be a bad idea. You risk turning your new forum into a garbage dump. Quality posts in a forum and how the threads are solved are what differentiate a good forums from bad ones. What you need is to get real people to interact, exchange ideas and benefit one another, thereby growing a happy online family.

Firstly it depends on what forum you are coming up with. Is that related to your knowledge? can you answer basic questions in the forum? Setting up a forum takes not more then 1hrs time but to make it success like Dani takes lots of time. I am really very impressed by dani's forum.