I'll skip over the usual website promotion techniques and do forum specific ones.

1) Put the 5 or 10 latest posts on your site home page. That will show people what is going on in your community and hopefully invite them in. It also helps to keep your homepage fresh.

2) Participate at other similar forums and put a link to your forum in your signature. Don't spam other forums! Participate naturally. You'll get traffic to your site from targeted visitors this way.

3) Have conversations with yourself. Dead forums aren't very exciting. Register a few usernames and have conversations with your self as each member. That will help to get your forum started and make it look active.

4) Run contests. People love to win stuff.

stymiee

great ways to promote new forums, however point number 4 is not clear, please elaborate.

Take for example the "The Best Blogger contest" of Daniweb wherein you get to win loads of stuff as well as a member badge saying you are the best blogger. People like such things a lot and are bound to participate in your forum activities to make a mark.

Also keep contets for choosing moderators and super moderators for your forums like the one with maximum posts (non spam) till this and this date will be appointed a moderator of so and so section.

Hope it helped, bye.

^ That's exactly what I was thinking.

Hah.. I am happy my first post here as the moderator of this forum was approved by Mr. Stymiee himself

This thread should be of interest to you:

http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforum...ad.php?t=42343

Hi,

I always find running a blog along side a forum is a good way to generate interest.

Regards.

It's funny but our forums started to take off at around the same time as we added blogs, but the blog feature never really took off.