Hey, i'm planning on opening my web development forum very soon. But, i need tips on promoting it. The url is www.devtrader.com I've run forums in the past, but marketing is where they failed.
I would say a contest is a great way. Offer a prize (>$1000) for the users who has the most posts / refers in a month. Promote your contest on other forums as well. Good luck.
You'd better provide some useful information there. For example, iwebtool, webconfs, etc, visitors will also visit and talk in their forum because of their SEO tools.
I believe traffic is the most important to get your forum fast growing. More traffic means more people know there is a new forum. Question is again, again how to get big traffic. Other important think is how to get impression from all members, I frequently many forum never grow up since it use very standard template and simple forum category.
So far as my exp the Google Adwords and Email Marketing are the best effective ones. However if we have small ad budget then FREE posting is the good choice untill we get sufficient amount and knowledge to do the paid advertising.
thats a good idea. Joshimitsu, you may want to also change your title tag and put some relevant keywords in there for seo purposes...