my tips for boards about physical things

if your board is about something you can do in real life, like drive cars or ride motorcycles, a good and cheap way to promote your forum is to make postcards and go put them in the stores that sell the products your forum is about.

go to google, type in overnightprints.com, click on their sponsored link (is the very first one) this will get you the super discount link to their postcard printing, its $129 for 4000 4" x 6" postcards. you cant beat that. and 4000 cards put in stores that your forum is about will get you lots of new users who are interested in what your forum is about and thats how you become a big board.

[Ntfu2]

tried that and did not get that pricing at all

[nevetS]

I used to have an office in Santa Ana near an area that was districted primarily for print shops. I poked my head into a few and found one place (of course I have no idea what the name is...) that had pricing that was well below anything you could find online - and that for serious quality print jobs. They only did full color, and you had to do all your own pre-press, but the price couldn't be beat and the turnaround was always 7 days. I used them on countless occasions.

I would recommend checking your local yellow pages and finding where all the printers are, and then doing some legwork.

I did find, however, that the places that brought us actual business where we left flyers and business cards were few and far between. After a few months, we ended up reducing our costs greatly by only seeding the areas where people seemed to take real interest - which also happened to be the areas that were most friendly to us dropping off stacks of flyers and business cards.

It wasn't a lot of business that we gained, but after 2 customers, it was all profit - as the printing had paid for itself. It's better if you go to places that you frequent yourself, since a stack of promotional materials in disarray might just look like trash or junk to customers.