It depends on the resources availabe to yu. SEO would bring traffic in the long term. Short term is harder and would rely on you have ing resources availabe to yourself such as targeted opt-in email lists. Paid advertising on similar niche sites?
The problem is that I'm targetting a regional market as well.. which is where I run into the issue, as most of the existing forums either don't take advertising or are really restrictive
Do you have to advertise on a forum, can you not find websites that fit your niche and region? Maybe you can negotiate a partnership with them?
The kind of people I would be interested in attracting are developers, marketers and SEO types. They only seem to have their own sites ....
Yeah, niche forum marketing may work best with partnerships. However, many forums are likely to restrict advertising as you have encountered due to the fact that it could be seen as competition to their forum. In an ideal environment, they would enable promotion of it - although it is not yet a concept that many niche markets tend to employ. Keeping your forum active will be a main priority, even with low members, so as to encourage other people to register if they encounter an active forum. It will more than likely be long term that you would grdually build up unless you are taking out a paid advertising campaign ie via adwords or some other CPC or CPM advertising.
I find that I am having the same problem. One of my forums is just dedicated to Mp3 player ZUNE which is not even out yet. I am thinking at this time I might sell it after failed attempts to advertise it :S
Content and networking. Fourms are difficult, because you can't get them off the ground until you amass a critical mass.
Thanks for the input. I'm hoping that SEO and a few carefully placed links will get it going to some degree, but I don't expect to see it booming overnight When you're primarily targetting the Irish market only you have to be realistic !