[VirtualFrost]

SEO + Rent ads on other websites.

[Cumslut]

Try getting some of your friends to join and come with feedback, invite them through Skype, and ask if they could ask some of their friends to join.
Just be careful about spamming it everywhere, as some may take that as a sort of challenge and try to ruin your forum.
For example spamming on Reddit and w.e. can bring some serious cancer to your forum.

[Red_mybb_import25644]

If you don't know how to advertise a forum, you won't last long. But hey, just letting you know.

It's not that we don't know how to it's more the fact everyone seems to deny us advertising.

SEO + Rent ads on other websites.

SEO helps but can only get you so far.

[Limited Edition_mybb_import25645]

The best source of traffic is organic, meaning improve your SEO, make your site easy to find.

Facebook is good to target particular people, certain age, location, niches etc..

Not joking but even putting a few flyers up on collage / uni noticeboards, shop windows etc.. would help a little. All it takes is somebody like myself walking past to see it and think "I'll at least check out that site".

Buy social media shout outs. Find a page relative to your niche(s) and buy some shout outs. Even 0.01% of 100k followers = 100 people at least clicking the link to check the site out.

Any other larger forums that allow advertisements (such as HF). Also contacting old dieing forum's staff and seeing if they'll allow you to post or just post anyway hoping the few users who use the forum decide to jump ship. I know this is a dirty tactic but why the hell not? haha.

[Oblitus]

If I was to advertise/publish my forum after it's open, I'd get a group of dedicated members/friends and ask them to start advertising with me at one point and at one time all together on all forums and websites that allow advertising. Along the lines, I wouldn't suggest you advertise your forum if it didn't have something special or unique that's barely on any other forum, like a tool (exploiting), program, etc. Thus you should (if you know how to code) make a couple things that will attract people (again, like a tool for exploiting, or a program, etc) to your forum and make them stick around. And copyright it if you want so people don't "resell" or "repost" it on other forums.
Tools can be anything from bots to websites that guarantee resources in a specific game, can be a tool for like diep.io or any of those .io games, or a forum spammer that's expensive (has a list of proxies, makes (X) amount of accounts and each account makes (Y) amount of posts with the (Z) body content for each post.



Otherwise, for big forums you can do a trick and purchase an award on there, and for the award to be won/achieved on that forum they have to visit your forum and do the specific tasks you've listed in the award/forum thread. Could be something like "Make 100 posts and invite 5 active members" or anything along the line, make the requirements big though since the forum you're buying an award on should be huge and awards should be hardly gain-able on there.

Do tutorials for anything, mostly Graphics and in the tutorial you've used a specific pack of images or anything, post in the description
"Images Pack: (LinkToThreadOnYourForum)
For more, visit: (YourDomainUrl)" or anything along the lines. Or make MyBB tutorials for themes or some tips and tricks like navigation bar tricks, styled buttons and display the code on a thread in your forum, etctera.

[BlueJay_mybb_import25666]

As I've said, all forums nearly denied me .