Marketing
 

Ok ive seen those massive forums with like thousands of members. I was wondering how do you actually advertise a forum and get active members?

It takes work. You can't just get a billion members overnight.

There is no one solution for this. It's part marketing, part luck, and a lot of effort on your own behalf. Sign up for similar communities, put your site in your signature, and become a part of those communities. When I first started my site, that's how I got the majority of my memberbase.

Don't just plug your site, take the time and actually contribute, be a part of that community, and eventually members will start to use your own site as well. You can't just slap your site in your signature and post nonsense once a month and expect to gain new members. As you build online relationships, your own site will start to grow in kind.

Other than that, SEO, solid content and things that make your site unique and worth registering at are basically the keys. Ask yourself why you sign up for forums, and what you want to see. Then craft your site around those things and put in the work to make it look good, work well and be a place that YOU would like to visit daily. As always, the biggest key to it is patience.

Edit: Also, the paid modification forum here, for me, has been great in terms of making my ideas happen and generating traffic as a result of things that I thought would be great additions to my site but didn't have the time/skill to code them myself. I've paid about ~$500 in custom mods to coders here in the last two years, and it's been well worth it.

Hire a marketer to help you :) I disagree with the above poster who claims its down to luck. A good consultant will deliver you results, although you should ask for a proven track record, backed up by references and statistics. It'll not be cheap though ;)

I would say many variables [i.e. Topic+Design+Concept+SEO Techniques+etc+etc]

I didn't say it was all luck, I said luck was a part of it.

You can SEO and hire consultants until your face turns blue, but if the content isn't there, the site will fail, plain and simple.

Massive sites with thousands of members didn't become that way in a month... or even a year... it takes a lot of work, a lot of research, and a lot of patience.

The posts above pretty much give valid suggestions on how to do it in a logistical way. But in my experience, the way you interact with your members, as well as the content you have available on your forum, contributes greatly to return visits and "referrals" ...

The thing that's gonna make your site more successful is the return visits, not the first-time/one-time guests, which is what most of the suggestions above will undoubtedly deliver.

I've seen forums with just over 10,000 members have a more active user base than a forum with 100,000+ members...

- T

Exactly, i think (talking based on my experience) that the hardest thing is to get ACTIVE MEMBERS, visitis come withe the time or withe SEO TECHNICS, but the thing is tthat users participate in ypur forum, thats the hard thing to get.....

Just provide good content and constant members that can filter and moderate the forum.

Always work hard, keep it clean and interesting.