It's already set up, has a few categories - probably needs a couple more, but how do you encourage people to visit or more importantly to post? How should I promote it without spamming? I do have some advertising credits for yahoo and adwords but deciding whether these credits would be best used promoting my travel forum or something else. Do people care enough about rank on forums to offer special rank to the first 100 (or some number of) registered users...or mod status for contributing x number of...I dunno, trip reports or something?
HI moloch, its really challenging to drive traffic into a new forum, you can check my signature. I offered some rewards for user to signup, posts, refer etc. My forum start on 1st of June. I think its not something that can be rushed, just go steady and you should find them increasing gradually. best way is post in other forum, blog comment, articles submission etc. If you can, ask a freelancer to create videos and upload in youtube Just a thought.
Forgot to say, "Number of traffic = number of effort you made" and you can multiply the number of traffic by 10 if you make a post in DP.
I don't think people care much about ranks. The main thing you need to do with a forum early on is get visitors and get them active. This can be very difficult when you have nothing to start with. You might like to try our post exchange over at http://www.aardvarkinternet.net/chat - it's a group exchange where a few of us with different boards club together and exchange posts...