first see what is your field of interest then search something on it before starting then just go on and on and on and yeh also hire some mods to do some posting it will also help you to make it big
Paid posting is good in the very beginning, but be sure to stop as soon as the forum is established. Then, work on your networking skills to attract real people.
you definitely need some sort of content to engage the visitor right away. What I did with my Musician Forums is gathered a bunch of free use articles and posted them. I also created an online battle of the bands where the winning band gets home page exposure for a month. Now I have all these bands sending there fans from myspace..
Paid posting is good only if the posters are familiar with the topic. Otherwise they'll just take the forum down the wrong track!
Yeh you have to scout good posters and pay them well. The last thing you want is spammy threads. Then having to pay the posters. And turning possible members off. Loose loose.
Social bookmarks are good for traffic! But they don't convert into signups (may be not for my forum..)
ive heard of things that relate to this, dumpster diving websites, tree huggers, etc etc, would all get really into this sort of thing imo try writing up some articles about the launch of this great new site, and submit it as free content for tree hugger sites to publish, asking for a backlink in the process you could possibly network together a ton of sites related to environmentalist sort of things into this...then from there move on to the next area of market sounds like itd work imo
Make a video You be in the middle of the trash . Then post your vid on youtube and the 50 other websites