I hope that I've posted in the right section. If not, please move it to the right one. What are your ideas in incresing activity on forums? I see that content is not the king in here. Or this is my guess.
I believe that you posted in the right board considering that you're discussing about the forums you are running and the issues or asking advices for your forums. To the subject, I have ran a successful forums several years ago with over ten thousands of users within' half a year and I learned that keep your users engaging in the conversations on some of the subjects increase the activity in forums and or command your moderators to posts as possible as they can including with creating the threads so to engage the registered users and to lure the guests into registering accounts. But on my forums, what keeps the users so busy on the forums is the arcade I have integrated and it became a hit where they challenge their friends or family to play some games but to do so they must register so that they can accept their challenges on the games in the arcade to be the top scorer (trophy) on different games. Before I integrated the arcade, everyone always posting in the forums constantly until I integrated the arcade onto the forums it doubled the activity along with bringing even many more users, making me kind of wish that I didn't shut it down.
It's about a webmasters forum that had a lot of activity few years ago. I see that content doesn't make people interested as before, maybe some of them. To promote it I will try different strategies, like posting in forums that accept promoting other websites, or why not, paying for some advertising banners on different forums running the same niche. There is no such thing as an arcade because the forum is more like a business one, and not for kids & parents to play with. Thank you for your advice Joshie. I will be more than glad to see others opinion, it's nice to find out different ideas.
Ah, webmasters forum. Now that is different story. Well the contents is still important but it depends on if they are interesting or not which is where you and your moderators jobs comes in to create interesting threads so to get your users to post in these threads. On the other webmaster forums that I have just registered not too long ago (I don't like it) I noticed that their referral system is taking a huge hit for some reason, I guess some of the people like to show the pride in marketing (because being top referr means they're good with promoting/marketing). Advertising? It depends how would you advertise it, because if you advertise in a social media like Facebook then that may be a bit hard because not everyone know what is "web masters" or such, so advertising on some other webmasters forums or in some niche then that'd make more sense.
I would suggest providing a free service/tool. That's where I am. I have a couple of tools that I would love to share with Moderators of forums but I know only the basic about marketing nor do I know where their watering hole is. My guess is that there is not such a place. Sorry I digressed. I can think of several tools that webmasters could use. That's my two cents for what its worth. Buddy
Don't discount content, though! Content, especially unique, interesting content will get you traffic from search engines. Search engines, at least in my experience, have always been my primary source of new users. Basically what I'm saying is: Never stop posting.
Try and make sure that you can get (relevant) questions answered. People will often not invest time in forums, particularly new ones unless they have a burning questions. Then they may take a chance. If a new user sees a question answered relatively quickly and relatively informatively then they may come back and start supporting the forum. You don't need many frequent and knowledgeable commentators to get a critical mass for a forum, but it's hard to get them. Another hint is to watch out for disruptive users and either convert them or ban them.
Initialy, start posting interesting opinions, questions, posts in different names to your forum. like which car can i buy Honda or Mazda be even more specific with the current trend. You just need to keep on posting. Also, manauly approve the users don't hesitate to ban the user with some stupid profile link.
A point that I'd forgot earlier is not to have too many sub-forums at first. Try to only have one. That gives more of a sense of activity rather than optimistically created forums that don't have an update in two months. It also means that urgent questions are more likely to be seen and that people can be sure that if they start a conversation then it will be answered. Over the longer term (and I accept that this is not going to be useful for you now) start looking to split the forum into sub forums. Wait until there is the volume then hive off the posts by moving the posts out and quite aggresively moving posts that don't fit on the main forum any more, off topic is usually the first sub forum but let the market decide (complaints about a subset of users being silly, off topic or obsessed with one particular area is a really good sign that its time for a subforum). You may have a quirky structure but you'll develop small groups of devotees and you may (in fact it's quite likely) over time develop a couple of niches that are not quite catered for as well on any other parts of the internet.
You can increase the forum activity by giving free stuff away, hosting contest, being engaged and friendly, having active moderators, you can also try forum posting service.