Get something on the forum even if you have to get 5 or 6 buddies just to go on there and ask questions.. to put some data there.. if you get an interesting conversation going between friends who are posting to help you out and the conversation is good and interesting you will get more input.. If I arrived at a forum and all sections had ZERO data I would be outa there... since what help could I expect from a totally dead forum.... so it might be dirty pool to do that but any traffic that finds you will not stay and will not post.. That is my two cents... so no matter how hard you work to get traffic no one will log in.... so you have a two fold project... get traffic and figure out how to get them to post... Make sense?
You have to optimize your website for your targeted keywords. On top of that you should add more content to it and make sure that it is also optimized for the search engines. Once you have done that you should then send Adwords traffic to it. Make sure that you are also using tracking such as Analytics or something similar.
If you want to get quick traffic then you can try to Google ad words for this otherwise go for SEO for rank in SE.