SEO + networking imho, but I'm only a beginner at forum management :)

seo + quality content ;)

the only thing that will make your site grow is having fresh content on a daily basis ... and, I don't mean just posts (posts usually have no 'meat' to them) ... I recommend articles, reviews, and blogs...

without them - it wouldn't matter how much money or time you spend on advertising, seo, networking, etc

Spamming other forums... lol just joking haha.
I installed facebook_connect and have since been adding content to my facebook page which has gotten more people coming to my website.

I am in the merge of making my forum grow, but cant seem to do it.

Don't have too many forum sections, be quite general.

Computer Hardware. instead of Graphics Cards. Processors. Memory sections.

There's nothing worse than a huge list of forums each with < 10 topics in.

We opened the Flame Warzone, basically it's no holds barred mayhem in there. There's a warning if you're in there be prepared to get flamed. It's fun for the member that like that stuff, and it keeps the rest of our board nice and friendly.

It's all about having a good strong community feel. Don't have power hungry mod's, and let guests view, restricting forums will just make people move on.

all good advice craig.

Built it lol

We are presently running a little experiment on a new site we've setup. It's just six of us total on the team. We just started with a basic VB install with vbAdvanced and VBSEO. Right now, we're just posting some content relevant to the area that the board covers.

All of us have experience or are current mods/admins at a couple of large VB sites. So, we're going to play with the board and see at what point does the traffic begin to really pick-up. We're monitoring raw server logs and also Google Analytics. (no advertising on the board at all, for now.)

That YouTube idea really hit a chord with our team, so we are going to look at what we could do with YouTube to help promote what we are doing.

Our direct compeition is laden with advertising with 35% of the right side of the screen filled with ads. But, they are owned by a local media company and have some good content for their main page. (forum is VB) Their forum is also very heavily censored, mainly to please the advertisers and the controlling owners. We offer more 'adult' oriented sections that are very popular where we are, we expect that to be a large attraction point for maybe 40% of potential users. (it's not graphic, just reviews of adult places such as bars/pubs and some more deeper nightlife activities.)

Well, I can follow up in a few months to see how things go. The site has only been up for about two months. We currently have about ~15 unique visitors per day.

Summary of tools we are using as of now:

- Google Analytics
- Google Webmaster Tools
- vBulletin 3.8 (w/ VBESO & vBAdvanced)
- A few useful vb.org plugins
- Raw web server log tracking
- No Advertising on the forum -OR- advertising for our forum on other sites.

We are anxious to see VB4. That may change our direction a little.

EDIT: Just a quick note; I'm not posting the URL to avoid contamination of the experiment results. We do want the site to flourish, but in due time. :D

EtherNetFreak your test is completely redundant as you have several variables overlapping each other. You have natural site growth, natural search engine traffic, supposed vBSEO-induced search engine traffic, and you are posting quality content.

To conduct a reasonable scientific tests you'd need to isolate your variables and create three identical sites, on three different domains (and servers) and post your quality content on one, do nothing on the other, and install vBSEO on the other. Even then you could argue that vBSEO traffic is just natural organic search traffic.

The fact of the matter is, it's almost impossible to prove a certain factor has any bearing on your sites growth, other than content. After all, that is what people come for on the internet :)