Getting real members for your forum will take some time and you will have to work hard at your end. Create Accounts and post useful and informative posts on your forum. You can also get material from other forums and convert it into your own words and post. Select some of your reliable and honest members or friends as moderators. This title will make them active and participate more than others. Rewards like access to your premium contents or download areas can be granted to those who are regular and participated much populate your forum.
It's easy to create a forum, but the hard part comes when you need to promote it. SEO is OK but it's a forum and requires people to post in it to be active. More then 80% of your visitors will be lazy to write a post and will look only for a useful information. If you manage to get >100 active members it will become goldmine. For sure you will make good money out of adsense and may be later sell ad spots.
yes this true you can use smf or anything ( still free ) and later if your forum is grow up you can convert it to vBulletin or you can use vBulletin nulled ( offcourse you need offshore hosting )
I have not payed for anything on my forum only thing that was payed for is the .info domain I got like 2 months ago before I was using a cz.cc domain now my alexa rank is 668k forum is a adult using mybb
I'm going through this joy at the moment - Trying to attract users. I've spent a lot of time making the site appealing to visitors, but now the hard work begins! - Good luck. It's hard work but fun!
seo is really hard for getting the general forum on to the top.. I am already in it but still no results