Webmaster/Webhost Forum - Where to begin?

I am interested in starting a forum similiar to ozzu however more geared towards webhosting. I have one BIG QUESTION however:

Where do I get the initial posters/members?

Nobody (myself incuded) wants to post in an empty forum or one w/few members. Therefore, how do get the initial posts to make it an active forum?

How did ozzu first get its first members?

Thanks for the input!

you can advertise by word of mouth on a search engine i.e. google invite your friends put your links in signature etc.. i think word of mouth is alot easier and can get a satisfying amount fo members

The question you've posed is not specifically a web design question.

//moved

It is definetely a challenge. Ozzu got its initial userbase by advertising with Google Adwords. After there were a few members here to work with discussion slowly picked up. To be successful with a forum you need to start posts and create lots of useful content so that people will want to return. Yes that means YOU will have to start alot of posts and post good content (or hire someone to do that). Do not start topics and then have a short sentence for the post. Post something useful, paragraphs of information is good. It will seem as if you are talking to yourself, but slowly as search engines pick up the content you will start getting more visitors and more replies. If you go here take a look towards the top at number of new users by month and number of new posts by month:

statistics.php

That should give you an idea how slow things were at the start and how things progressed and are still progressing. Also on that page take a look at: "Most Active Topicstarter". If you put 2 and 2 together you should figure out why Bigwebmaster (me) is ranked #1 for that. Eventually I figure I will not be #1 anymore, but you should plan on being the most active topic starter for many months, or over a year (as in ozzu's case).

Overall if you are going to start a forum you have to be 100% serious about it and be prepared to spend a great deal of your time there. For many months 50% of the posts at ozzu were by me.

You've done a wonderful job too BWM. Thanks for this great informative post, I think this info is transferrable to any kind of forum someone wants to start.

BWM< just a cosmetic note, on that statistics.php page, you don;t have the PR xfer optimized, I would recomend changing the url's of the topics from the default viewtopic.php to ftopic

Is there any profit in it?

If I need to pay folks to post at the beginning will I be able to recoup my costs?

How does ozzu make money?

hey thanks for that tip BWM

ozzu has ads, in case you didn't notice ;D