Originally Posted by flashback

submit to search engines.. affiliate with people that are popular.. offer original stuff.. update frequently..interact

affiliate with people that are popular.. eh heheh. I think geeks have been trying to do that for decades now.

Give away a free cup of coffee good at say an advertiser at your site, like Starbucks? To all invites that stop in and chat at your forum.
Just an Idea,

Article submission is hot right now.

I currently run my own forum and am temporarily residing on a free host. Within the next few days I'll be going paid again. My active member base is quite pathetic and it's just me, a few staff members and one or two other members that post every once in a while.

I've been trying all I could to generate traffic to my website, gain new active members. I've created a sitemap, got my site verified by Google, submitted my website to Google etc... I've been actively improving the look of my forum and making it more user friendly with features.

However no matter what I do I can't generate much traffic. I am currently trying to optimize my forum/website more efficiently for search engines, however because of my lack of experience in being a webmaster there is a lot of things I don't know how to do.

The community I run is a legal gaming and emulation community and also has other sections to discuss various other things.

If anyones interested and wants to take a look to provide valuable feedback, tips or anything else that will help me please take a look at my forum:

http://www.xtemu.com/forum

write the articles and post into the different article directories will get more traffic to u r site and if u do Social Bookmarking for the article pages, automatically it will increase the traffic.Last but bot the least, keep updating the site. Hope it helps you!

Most of the forum now are not allowing links signature, if you allow it on your forum many will register, but only you have to avoid spam, means do not allow people who obviously advertise their sites.

it also depends how interesting the title, the content of your post and the how related to the forum.

Do not put yourself down. Keep trying. Things take time. Maybe try some auto blogs.

I always want more people to join, but our rules are strict as our forum caters for mature minded and older generation so the new ones do not rush in numbers, but it is well respected all over the net for the best content ever, see: InternationalDiscussions.com. If there were a place that would advertise for a certain age or 'mind' I would love someone to show it to me.

What is amazing about this thread is how many of the posters who talked about the difficulty of running a forum are no longer running their forum. Clicking on their links gets you nowhere. I thought about running a forum too but after being to so many forums with so few posters i had second thoughts. No easy.

In my case it is not getting traffic, it is getting the right traffic!

I have recently begun answering some questions and Yahoo Answers, all directly relevant to my niche community, and will include a deep link to a directly relevant thread within the body of my answer. I have noticed a limited number of visits from these links, as well at least 1 new registration. Has anyone else tried this tatic to get new registrations and contributors?

Also, start a gallery relevant to your forum and load that thing up with great pics, good descriptions, and alt tags. I get tons of traffic from Google Images.