Aww hell. I'm going to add a second post. I guess I'm partly writing this for Leela, but also partly I'm just trying to hash out what I need to do with my new forum.
So. I ran contests on my successful site. I haven't had to do one in months. However, back in March through July, as the forum was getting started, I held monthly contests. I kept the prize money low, and distributed the wealth. Instead of 1 $200 prize, I would do 1 $100 prize, 2 $25 second-place prizes, and 5 $10 third place prizes. Same cost, but more people came away happy. And the first place prize was still OK.
With my Narnia forums, I want to get dossiers of each actor in the movie. I may offer a $10 bounty for each dossier-like post that I can use. I may also just have a post-count battle. Those can go sour, as people are encouraged to write 1-word puff posts. But there might be ways to make it work.
Also, if you have merchandise with your logo & URL on it, give some of it away. It's free advertising.
Back when I started my forum, I pushed my family & friends to create accounts & post. That was helpful. It's important at the beginning.
I agree with those who say you should only have a few forum areas to start with. On my good site, I had about 20 sections at first. But they were eeeeeeeemmmpty. I started consolidating. I got down to 9, so that each had some reasonable traffic. Now I think I'm up to 11 or 12, driven by demand. It would have been wiser to just start with 7 or 8 sections and grow.
You need to contact other sites. I was very afraid of this, because I didn't want to come off as a spammer. I thought that writing "hey, please link to me" would be in poor form. So I started adding reasons to email people. Here's an example that I'm working on right now. Although my site (the successful one) is called "Publisher Database," most publishers don't know about it. The site is community-driven, I don't
need the publishers to be present. However, I could use their good word-of-mouth. So I'm building a news section where they can post calls-for-entries and announce reading periods and so on. I will then email them to tell them about the site and the feature they might want to use. I haven't figured out how to email people about my Narnia site yet, but I'm working on it. I do have the "email me if someone replies to my post" option enabled by default, so members do get email. It's a start.
I did do
PR Web for press releases. Didn't get me much publicity, but at the $80 level, it did generate some traffic for my site.
Similar to posting in forums, I added comments to blogs that were related to my area of expertise. Depending upon the blog and how good your comment is, that can gain you nothing to hundreds of visitors.
OK. My brain is winding down. Last tip. Consider seriously the usability of your forum. I went a bit farther than most do. Over at my personal site, I created and gave away a handful of
phpBB mods that helped fix usability problems. Here are the places people trip-up. First, they balk at a too-big membership form. Try to keep it short at first, with options to expand it later. In the case of VBulletin, I think it's OK out of the box. With phpBB, you can install a "simple registration" mod to shorten the registration form down to bare essentials (I have done this). Second, people constantly need to be reminded of their activiation keys & passwords. You must have links for this ("forgot my password," "resend activation email"), right by the login area. Mine didn't. I lost about 350 members thanks to that. I didn't realize it was an issue until I had about 1500 members. My database was packed with accounts that had been abandoned mid-registration, and most accounts had been that way for months. I emailed them all friendly reminders, but for most, it was too late. Their email accounts were dead, or they had found another forum, or they just didn't care anymore. Make sure people can fix their own login issues right away, if at all possible. You'll retain more of them that way.
OK, that's my brain dump. Those are all the things I did to get or retain members.
-Tony