I've been trying to get my site off the ground, and while traffic has been increasing somewhat steadily, getting registered users and people posting on the forum has been the most difficult. right now, the forum is pretty much made up of myself, my gf, and one of my best friends. I have a few email accounts, and I was thinking of starting multiple accounts and making posts under various names, to make it look like it has more traffic. I figure this would be good for a little while so it actually appears like there is some discussion going on. has anyone tried this? what were your results? what are your thoughts on this matter in general?
Its definetly good if you want to make it look active. Don't post too much on them though, your new visitors might see it's you after a while.
if you can post good content in there, that would be the actual "value" to the visitors. You can fake the "no." of people but if you can't really provide people with value, they would soon leave the forum. Stickiness would all depend on the value you are giving to your visitors.
I would say, yes, make fake accounts. Be sure to post on them a couple times just to get some activity going, and then maybe hire some forum posters.