What are good promotional tools for promoting forums and gaining traffic? Where do you submit your advertisements? Do you do paid advertising, and how well does it work? Do you hire posters? I'm just curious how people here attract users to their forums and how they got started, especially those of you with bigger forums. You don't have to talk about all of your trade secrets, just some...

A free directory submission at Top 100 vBulletin (http://www.top100vbulletin.com/) helps get things started.

If there are magazines for your topic it can be very helpful if you can get them to mention you.

It depends... for the most part, I advertise by word of mouth. I usually Tell friends who are interesting in the topic I do my site on, and then they go on to tell their friends, etc. Usually it works pretty well. At the moment, I don't have a site any more since it went into limbo for other reasons, but later on I may restart it. It all depends on how things go.

I also regiter on a number of sites, and include my signature with links to my site, as well as a link to my site in my profile so I get the maximum back-link effect too. :D

For me it is almost all word of mouth. My fourm is fairly specific so isn't that attractive to people who just want to chat. It is more of an on-line community for people who already know each other in RL.

However, I do lease with other dance companies and get reciprocal links etc. Plus try and encourage them to advertise the site in their newsletters. Sadly I get more no's than yes'es. :(

It's always difficult to start, but once you get started, you can go to other webdesign related forums and ask people to comment on your webdesign, some may get interested, you may also place links to forums in signatures in posts on other forums.

I have heard that some of forum owners provide charge for posyting on forum. I'm not sure that it is good idea, but as far as I know it works.

building solid content
build backlinks
sig links on sites related to mine
and be helpful when ppl do stop by

I think that your forum should be interesting for visitors first of all. First time I think better provide fee for posting.

There are several effective techniques for forum promotion, at the very beginning you need to have a group of people, friends or someone you will pay to, then when there's a decent number of threads and posts make other people aware of your forum existence and the benefits it offers, at this stage you can use your sig at others forums, write articles with links to your forum, go to other related forums and talk to the owners about placing each other's baners. And of course, the most effective way is to offer freebies or some exclusive info your visitors won't find anywhere else.

Another wonderful idea is to give freebies to your members, free domains or other services.

Another wonderful idea is to give freebies to your members, free domains or other services.
If you can afford them, of course. ;)

What are thr forums which are successful because of freebies they give away?

I submitted my site to the Top 100 vBulletin (http://www.top100vbulletin.com/) sites.
It was approved yesterday..

Does anyone get many hits off of that directory??

2 things I can think of
Simple...

vBSEO
Sig it