Create the illusion of activity
Don’t expect to get users to sign up and post if it’s a ghost town. People want someone to talk to, and not just yourself. Don’t be ashamed if you have to create a fake account or two to start some conversation. Sometimes it can be therapeutic to have a nice chat with yourself

On a forum of my own (which has been neglected) I removed the “topics” column from the forum view. This just left with the amount of replies, which can make you think that’s how many topics there are. You can see the small community at fortunefaded.com

There are many paid posting services out there. I find that they can help, if you can find a good company. I have tried a few in the past, and the most effective company in my opinion has been inb0x.

Invest

Investing time and money is a great way to give yourself that extra boost. Buy a top of the range forum software, you won’t regret it! You will notice that it helps people take your forum much more seriously.
As i’m sure you know, there is much more competition with forums these days than there ever was before. There are so many more forums. You need something to separate yourself from the rest. Why not make it your design? If you have the money, outsource and get a great looking design. First impressions do matter.

There are many other things and ways of investing into your community. One other great way is competitions. Not only do they help bring new members, but it helps keep current members active and happy. Get a prize that suits the niche of your forum, make it good - worth their while.

Base it on a passion

It’s no good starting a fishing forum if you have never been fishing, and you don’t like it. That means it obviously doesn’t interest you. Start it on something you really love, find people who share this passion to come and join your forum. Forums are hard work, you wouldn’t be able to write for long about anything without getting tired of it.

Get something out of it

Make yourself goals for traffic, so that you can sell advertisements. Earning money from your forums will keep you motivated. It will make you try harder to increase the amount for the next month. Even a very small amount of money is motivational, at least you have a good reason to run it, right?

Patience is a virtue

Want to know the killer secret about building the killer community? Patience. It’s very rare to get a forum to succeed overnight. Look at all the largest forums on the web at the moment, find out how old they are! If you search big-boards, you will see that the largest forums are quite a few years old.

Don’t be put down if your community is tiny, it usually takes at least six months for most communities to really take off. Although, six months is too long for most people. They end up slapping the site on the sitepoint marketplace, because it wasn’t a passion of theirs.

My name is Josh Buckley. I am a young entrepreneur/blogger from England. David has asked me to do a guest post for him today seeing as he’s away… If you enjoy this post, don’t forget to check out my blog and subscribe to my feed.