Hello. First of all, I'm so glad that I found this forum. Semi-noob like myself can learn so much! I have a website that's growing nice and steady. Not much, but it's going up there. The problem now is the website. I get hundreds of unique visitors each day, but I don't know how to drive people to the forum. I'm not very familiar with the forum system (as admin). Any pointers would be awesome! Thanks.
I think that one of the biggest turn offs that new visitors have with a forum is when it looks dead. It is a good idea to have new posts daily and this will also help with rising in the serps as well. Also if your forum is a part of your website make sure that it is advertised blatantly on your website.
If you can't get people to post in your forum voluntarily, you may want to try paying people to start threads and make posts in your forum. This wouldn't be long-term of course. This step is just to jumpstart your forum.
1. Forum topics drives viewers to read 2. Interesting Discussion drives viewers to read more 3. Funny, Interesting Pictures drives viewers to post a comment 4. If they didn't bookmark your site, they won't come back
Hmm interesting. I just made the forum today, and yes it looks kinda dead. =( I'll add the website link on my signature soon.
Since I do not know the topic of your site, I can not offer any exact advice. But what I can tell you is from my personal experience. In April of 2007 I opened my youtube channel and started posting my own homemade videos. Over the past 25 months I have posted over 320 of my very own home made videos. This provides my forum with a steady stream of targeted traffic. The traffic is so targeted, its bounce rate is 18%, while traffic from google has a bounce rate of 48%. Maybe videos and video blogging will work for you, maybe it wont. But it might be something you should consider.
Oh wait, I can't put signature yet. I didn't know there were restrictions. Here's my link : http://gamersroute.com It's gaming related. And thank you all. I didn't expect this many replies in such a short time!
Hmm maybe it's a good idea to encode some of the amazing game replays that me and my friends came up with. Thanks for all of your replies!