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Forums need to start small. I didn't make my forums until I had a small following of likeminded individuals who wanted such a forum. Paid posters? Never. Infact, I turned down offers to help me pay for the forums. When you have such a group of people, make a small forum. It's better to have 3-4 active forums than 20 forums of 0-1 threads. I think the biggest problems new forum creators have is being too ambitious. They think if they make 20 forums their small userbase will post in all of them equally. Unfortunately, people tend to clump into a small cluster of really popular forums (general chat and the main forum topic area usually) and ignore the dozens of specialty forums. My first inclination on making my forums was to make tons and tons of topic areas, but fortunately, I had a friend with more foresight than me, who recommended just having 3-4 and adding forums only if demand arises.
What's that have to do with the topic? If your forums look busy, people will post. One catch 22 that almost killed my forums was that when noone is posting, noone wants to post. Noone wants to be the last one posting when noone else is around. By keeping all my threads clustered in a couple of forums, it put bigger numbers in the right hand columns everyone sees. That, and when people go to post in one thread, odds are they'll catch a few more topics in passing and post there too. This works for grocery stores - arranging merchandise to entice spur of the moment purchases. If you keep all your topics separated and out of sight from each other, people will tend to go in, post what they want, and then leave. Forcing people to do some modest browsing will encourage them to post in topics they wouldn't have otherwise seen.
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