Starting a new community is hard. Different from starting say, a blog, you have to have a user population that comes back. With something like a blog, people can read a few articles, click on an advertisement maybe, possibly tell their friends, and then they are done with your site. It is great if you have users that come back to your blog, but it isn’t necessary. With forums, this is absolutely necessary.
What this means
You need something on your forum that gets people to join, and later return to your forum. In most cases, this something is an active community. If you have an active community, new people will join, causing it to become a more active community. This loop continues until you have huge communities like http://forums.digitalpoint.com/. A problem arises: if an active community becomes a more active community with time, how do you start an active community. This is the hard part.
The difficulty of starting an active community
Starting an active community is the hardest part of starting a forum. People won’t join your community unless it is active, and your community won’t be active unless people join. How can you break this? There are a few ways. Other than the way that this website is based around, you could ask your friends. You just need to have a good amount of friends that are willing to join your community. You could advertise. A lot. Posting a link to your forum everywhere could help, but there is one more way. You could hire a forum poster!
What is a forum poster?
A forum poster is a person that you pay to post on your forum. If you hire a group of forum posters, they will start your community. If you hire good forum posters, people will think that they are real users that use your forum, not people that you pay. This will give you the active community, and then, based on what I said earlier, your community will become more active.
Where can I hire a forum poster?
Well, you could note the name of the website that you are on, and hire a forum poster here! The core website isn’t done yet, but it will provide tools for you to track the progress of any hired forum posters, and also find forum posters that are skilled and ready to post on your forum. Until the core website is done, just join this forum, and become part of the community. Maybe you could make a few friends, and start a forum that way, but if all else fails, you will be able to hire forum posters here soon.