When attempting to gain traffic on a forum one of the best things to do starting out is making links do follow this will give you alot of webmasters and bloggers trying to get one way links. Of course you will have to deal with the spammers at the same time. Another thing that is important for a forums success is making sure there is a constant update of posts; I have heard of forum owners hiring people to constantly post on their forum. This will give people the impression that your forum is active and worth participating in. These may help Also spend time on blogs and websites in your forums niche, if you get the interest of the webmasters in your niche they may offer a free link.
Agree with the above post, it's really an effective way to attract more members if the sig links in your forum are in dofollow. Make it ensure also that your forum has interesting category so that your forum will not be boring.. You can also conduct a contest like giving away some cool prizes for those posters who contributed lots of quality posts and for those who can refer some more members to sign up in your forum. Hope this helps.
That truly depends on your niche. If it's web related then yeah, having a dofollow sig can and does attract webmasters and web related people to post... but what what cost? An increased post count of one-liners that add little to no content to your forum. *shrug* There are tricks to tweaking out the value of a sig link, but sadly MOST people that hunt out dofollow forums and blogs do not bother with such fancy things... A NON-web related blog will not matter of the sig is do-follow or not. Most of it's members will not have a clue what that means. They will not know what PR stands for and will think that SERP is a government organization in charge of national security. If you want traffic to your forum, promote your forum through hard work, which ironically includes putting your forum link in your signature of other forums... A few related links here on DP: Forum Link Building tips (it's not just your signiture!) Buying sig links? Read this first! and most importantly: Promote your forum with a Street Team As you own a forum, you can get your members to help you promote it. By the members helping get the word out, you'll find that many of them blog about the topics they talk about (on forums) and likely post on related forums. To get them to link to you is something many of them do naturally, but giving a bit of a push can't hurt
First, make your forum as attractive as possible - even if its a well done free template and a bit of thought put into the structure names and descriptions of the ?forums?(the place where threads go). Then, think of ways to attract your niche - do follow might work for web enthusiasts, while regular competitions might work for creative forums (writing, design, script, photography etc). It depends on what you offer.
i think if you have got a webmaster related forum then it is quite necessary that you should have a pr of atleast 3