This forums looks quite professional and seems to be the right place to ask some questions about web-promotion.

The point is that recently we've started a new forum www.1-800-espresso.com. This is the place to share info and talk about coffee, coffee makers, espresso machines, ice cream and kitchenware etc.

I am pretty much concerned now in how can we promote this forum, make it a lively place and encourage more people posting there. I wonder if this forum might be of use as it is now integrated in a store?

Do you have any ideas?

I am quite unimaginative because I only ever depend on the search engines to bring me traffic to my sites.

I don't do advertising, I don't plug my sites in forum posts and lately I have even stopped posting anywhere else except here on GIDForums™.

This forum started really slow, it would go from 3 posts a day to absolutely no posts for the next 3-6 months, when it was first launched. Fortunately for me, that didn't really bother me... so I kept it around, just in case.

Instead I tried very hard to figure out why a search engine would index my web pages BUT not my forum pages. When I understood everything (ok, NOT everything), I made some changes and the forum just took on a life of it's own.

Most of the moderators were people I invited to the forum when it was first launched but that was all the inviting I ever did.

Some of the things I suggest you try:

1. Search Engine Optimise your forum script.
2. Submit it to any and every search engine / directory you can find.
3. Once you've done 1 & 2, you can start posting mini 'articles' occasionally in your forums just so that the SEs will have something to crawl and list off their SERPs.

That should bring in some TARGETTED traffic to your forum.

What you do then to entice someone who is already interested and at your forum, to register and become a member, is what sets you apart from your 'competition'. I am not implying that I know a secret or two here... it is no doubt the hardest thing to do, still. Even if you get one interested web surfer to register, there is no guarantee she's going to post... ever!

If you seriously want to encourage your new members to post and actively interact within the community, your administration and/or moderation team is the key. They must understand and direct the community so well, that no one gets to intimidate anyone else for any reason.

I personally think that there is no shortcut to making a forum grow but I know some people who will disagree with me. They are the same people who will suggest you create multiple dummy accounts and suggest you 'speak' to yourself during the first few months or... extend your forum script's ONLINE timeout setting to something ridiculous like 24 hours just so that it will appear that you have 125 people online at any one time, for example.

Thanks for the frank input, JdS. It gives us encouragement for a forum we recently started (not within our primary domain), which is showing less than stellar participation.

Thank you very much. This is really the most complete and useful answer I expected to have And you are right, on some other forums people advised me to talk to myself to make forum looking crowded. But one day forum may become absolutely senseless if nobody comes and makes posts there

Hmm.. nice trick, I should try some of it for my women community forum

most basic in promoting a forum is:
1. make it PR4 and above.
2. get people to post, self posting
3. then you promote site at other forums etc. this will bring in natural user.
4. organise contest etc

First basic rule of running a website is to know who you target audience is first and also how to get traffic to your site.

Some good ways may be to get some posts into your forums if you have not already got any. Some people pay people around $0.10 - $0.20 per post.

Other ways could be writting articles and then leaving your link in the authors resource box, leaving your link in your forums signature, etc.

It also doesn't hurt to put your forum signature in any other forum posts, although I can't figure out how to do that here.