How do you advertise a forum?

[Zander]

My friend is trying to advertise his new forum and I want to help him advertise but is there any free way I could? His forum is
http://bluepen.forumatic.com/

[Jake]

You would probably have to participate in a number of related forums and social sites, typically you may have to make 10 or more worthwhile posts on a forum to enable your ability to ad a link, and should establish yourself as a useful source of information on these sites.

Some professional site flippers speed the process of raising the value of a forum by paying people to participate or scraping content from other sites in order to reach that critical mass required for a forum to take off.

[wealthygirl66]

The forum is empty. I have no clue as to what the forum is even about. Don't bother advertising this forum til you make it a place where people want to hang out and post stuff. Right now, it would be a complete waste of your time and efforts driving traffic to this forum because people will just leave just as soon as they get there.

Once you've spruced up the forum and have a clear picture of what kind of people you want to attract, I suggest you do the following:

1. Facebook - Find related Facebook pages/groups etc and post a link to your forum without spamming.