My forum is growing old and collecting dust. I have spend alot of money for adsense, yahoo and stumble upon advertising. Plus the paid posters. Anyway, my point is that it's not working. Anyone with a successful forum want to share how they pulled it off?
I promote my site mainly through video blogging on youtube, dailymotion, metacafe, myspace, break and several other video sites. I make a video, then use a service like tubemogel to upload the video to a dozen sites at one time. My youtube profile - http://www.youtube.com/user/survivalistboards Video blogging is a lot cheaper then paid advertisements. And, the videos can target an exact nitch market. I do not know what your forum is about. But you could make videos about your every day life as a forum owner and the problems you run into. Its not really "that" difficult to start a video blog, you just do it.
This might seem a bit harsh but if the forum you are talking about is EliteTopics.com you may be having trouble because there are hundreds if not thousands of forums that are the same as yours. In this day and age it's very difficult to breakthrough with a "general" forum. You need to have a niche, a topic to concentrate on instead of trying to cover it all. The "general" forums that are doing good are doing so because they were most likely the first out there. But to help out find blogs that you like, make USEFUL comments on articles and leave your forum link with that comment. Don't just spam your link. Making useful comments will get people to at least become interested in your link and visit it, and hopefully sign up.