Hello,

My Forum has been open for 4 days now and not one person has registered. Does anyone have any tips on how to draw the right crowd in? Has anyone had a good experience with free advertising? If you have had any success in those fields reply please.

I'm using phpBB Forums.

-djFrantik

Hello,

You fist need to make your forum appealing, this will then get user more interested in your forum. As you have said it is a new forum I would suggest doing some post exchanges to add a bit of content to your site.

Also for member to sign up try offering something unique to the member like free web space to all users.

Also do some link exchanges to try and get your PageRank up.

Hopefully some of the above helps

-MGS-

you could always threaten random people to do something to them if they don't register and post...

:P

you could also try AdminFusion's PostFusion. I hear it's a good post exchange.

Post exchanges help, and adding your forum to many different directories greatly helps also.

If you go to webmaster/admin help sites, a lot of times they will have special forums where you can ask for post exchanges, and do post exchanges with other people. I have done that a couple of times. Not only does it add members and posts, if the person doing the exchange likes your site a lot, they will become a regular member.

submit your site to lots of search engines, make a google sitemap and submit it to google.
Advertise your site at other forums(pretty unprofessional way but no chance otherwise)
Goto chatrooms and advertise!
Get your friends.
Work with a good paid posting or get individual paid posters!
Make lots of new topics by yourself and register lots of names by yourself and post!

Google Sitemaps will help you drive more traffic to your site from Google.

I guess you as the admin should start the topic instead of letting it empty. At the same time, do the promotion such as posting in other forums or classified ads.

To promote your forum it is important to make good quality posts. Add quality posts in your forum. When members find good posts in your forum, then this will help in word of mouth promotion.