How did you get your members?

I thought this may be an interesting topic. How did you market your forums and receive members. I always see posts like this:

"I just started 2 months ago and have 3000 members now" or "I started about a month ago and I'm making $100 a day in adsense" - I'm asking people like these, how did you get so many members so quick? What type of advertising did you do?

I'm also not talking about just online advertising, but what types of offline advertisement did you do. Was it newspaper ads or fliers or anything like that?

If you don't want to post it for everyone to see or it's some type of secret, PM me instead and I promise I'll hold on to it ... seriously.

I've been broke for 5 years, spent about 100 hours a week every week for the last 4 years working on my sites and earned about $1000 in all that time, only going on hoping that at some point I'll come across a strategy or good way of finally getting it right. That SEO stuff is getting old and I'm practically an expert at it now, there has to be some other way that separates the millionaires and successful sites and forums from the 99% of webmasters and forum owners that make nothing and rely on SEO. I'm asking this in the big board since this is where most of the successful built forums are.

Thanks

[Deepdog009]

Wickland I hear ya my friend, operating a forum can be time consuming and tedius. BUT if U take your time and understand that U must cater 2 the members and give them what THEY want. With that in mind U will grow faster than just putting something out there that U want...

Im sure there are many that can tell U several other great ways 2 enhance and grow your forums, BUT still the key is U must have something that folks want and need...>>>

Wisdom grasshopper...

[midorinome]

What are your forum(s)?..

[wtricks]

I posted thousands of posts in over 200 forums related to my niches. I promoted with a sig. Little by little some were interested and visited. Some stayed. I kept them with articles they shouldn't find elsewhere (unless someone is stealing my content) and many interesting topics. It's a killer to start new topics daily, but we need to do this. I also promoted a bit in adwords and directories and made some link exchanges too

[rossco_2005]

We were the original forum for Kazaa Lite (alternative to kazaa [p2p program], with no spyware) back when it was in progress.
The home page linked to us.

We had incompetent admins who changed the name and let the url expire and the forum nearly died but now gets it's traffic by being the top result for bittorrent invite trading and one of the top results for nzb files (for newsgroups).

[Brandon Sheley]

Posting on other forums and search engines. about 40 / 60%.
A little over half my traffic is from search engines ( google )

[Tygerwoody]

My website has been up for nearly a year now. I have received 0 traffic from google. The only traffic I get is word of mouth. Either word of my mouth, or word of people on my site already. Its really hard for me to generate traffic.

[kobescoresagain]

Moderators/Adwords were my way of going. I got 10 good moderators with knowledge of the field and let them do the recruiting when I worried about the site. Then I added adwords program to strengthen the amount of people coming in daily.

[Invalid ID]

It took me 2 and a half years to get 1100 members. I had to tell my friends, and they told theres.

[Shazz]

Originally Posted by Invalid ID

It took me 2 and a half years to get 1100 members. I had to tell my friends, and they told theres.

Hard work
Whats your content?