Is it possible to promote a new forum with AdWords? Is it possible to word the ads cleverly enough that people will overlook the new emptyness of it all and still register/post?
My current strategy = Massive SEO work to get new threads indexed and highly ranked. This sends LOTS of users to individual thread pages from Google, but they're 99% lurkers and leave after reading the requested page.
For fresh forum blood, I invest in AdWords directed towards my navigational pages (such as the forum index and category pages). With no real content, Google isn't going to rank these pages very highly even if there is a link directly to them from Google's homepage. However, they make the best landing pages, and users who find these pages early on have a high tendancy to register. Therefore, it pays to actually pay to send traffic to these pages for fresh member blood even though we get so much traffic for free through the SERPS.
Now my question ... I want to massively promote this Site Management category, which hasn't exactly been up to par lately. Where do I turn first?