for hire? well I know of a forum that gives credits/points to members even by just browsing and reading. It worked. Now it has thousands of active members. Give out incentives and be an active moderator, make members feel that by replying to inquiries asap.
Does giving away prizes and using paid posters actually work long term? I mean once your prize is given or your paid posters are done posting what motivation do they have to stick around?
I have changed the layout of the site and the fourm script that i am using. Its still a free version but it has all of the same features as vbulletin through mods. Take a look and let me know if its any good. www.predictionpro.com
i have started a forum a few month ago. now i have over 4000 members, and over 25.000 post. I will tell you the secret in 3 words: WORK, WORK, WORK I have worked over 10 hours per day, and i still work for my forum Give something for free to your members and you can see the result very fast
Make sure you regularly post in your forum and keep your users happy, the best way to get more users is to have a contest.
One of my forums has over 5k members. All I really do is erase spam and let people talk. It´s an old domain that ranks very high. If you rank high in the search engines, you can put everything on autopilot pretty much. - Mike
Buy signature links from frequent posters on large, related forums. Have the sig link be someting intriguing...like a link to a controversial topic.
Not sure what you paid or the quality of your posts but I highly recommend inb0x.com. I just renewed and upgraded my inb0x package for a forum of mine. I also tried the trial $4.95 forumbooster.net package and got very low quality posts. If I wasn't lazier I would have contacted them and told them to stop before they finished (it was that bad).