Well, kicking start an online community, can be very difficult sometimes due to the lack of content. But here are some techniques: 1) Advertise on huge sites Such as sitepoint.com, digitalpoint.com etc.. However its still difficult to get people to post if the forum is dead. 2) Hire forum posters Expensive and time consuming, but they get the job done. However sometimes we may get posters who don't know what they're talking about. 3) Use content generation scripts You could use instant content generators which generate discussion topics to populate your board with lots of posts. They're EXTREMELY effective and can get your board more than 100K posts a day. Best way to make your forum seem active. Here is a service provider for instant community content, Instadigi is an automated community content generation script that allows a user to instantly populate a forum with discussion topics, making it easy to kick-start a new community website! Content is fully user generated, and inteligently syndicated from various sources all over the web. All a user simply has to do is specify the topic keywords and everything else is generated automatically by the system! You can check it out here: Instant Community Content Just a suggestion for all of you, to get the ball running for your forum.
another method: recruiting your real-life friends to participate in your online community after you have a decent user base, the viral effect will start...
True, data is syndicated from many sources, but this is not an issue when you just started a forum, and you badly need a kick start. Most forum posters or forum posting companies outsource all their data file them.Which means its also copied from elsewhere and paraphrased etc. If you are planning on using this on a forum that has been running a long time, its not very advisable because you have a low chance of being caught with something similar or duplicated, which is kinda rare. Just my 2 cents