How to save a dying forum?

What is the topics of your forum ?
Try to investigate which topics are hot and have such topics in your forum .
Beside, the advices above are useful . Take them if you have budget to promote your forum .

 

@ OP - you got too many forums. The total post count is rather small for the number of forums and sub forums, thus the whole community looks deserted. No one wants to participate in a deserted community. For that matter you should make 3/4 forums in the first place and merge all the posts. This will make your forum look busy.

Next, you could hire some people, why not hire staff to post some topics and threads on your forum that will make people want to join in and participate. These post should be interesting, thought-provoking, controversial, post that educate new comers and members.

You should also participate and post. How do you expect people to show up to your party if the man who is throwing it isn't there...?

Contest are another way to get exposure. However, you have to make sure that you never ask you members to have a certain post count or anything as the contest will immediately start revolving around the post count and quality will go downhill.

You Tube is yet another way to spread the buzz. Make a channel in You Tube with your forum logo. If you don't have a logo you better make one. That will be your online business card and it will help people recognize your community. Then, shoot some videos related to the topics discussed in your forum and upload them to the channel. You could also try finding videos that have a lot of views and that are showing stuff relating to your forum's topic, then contact the owners and ask them if you could rent the space in the about section of the video. If you agree on a price then you could put your forum link there. Hopefully the videos with lots of views will bring you many visitors as these videos are always being watched.

The expansion of your forum should be done carefully and with the help of your member base. Besides the contest you should always make threads asking your members what they like/don't like about your forum, what they want to have in the forum as a section or a feature. You should make your members realize that it is not you running the forum. They have to feel like they are doing that themselves. After all the forum is created for people who would be interested in posting about such topics, right?