Generating traffic

I am very new to website development and over the past two months I can say that I have learned more than I ever thought I would. A lot of that knowledge has come from this forum. However, over the past two or three weeks I have found myself increasingly just looking at my website numbers. Of course, my numbers are quite pitiful...maybe 10 unique visitors a day or something like that. This morning I was reminded of an old college professor of strategic management who used to say that many companies fall behind because they get too busy looking in the mirror and they forget about their core business i.e. selling their products and developing/innovating new products. Well, that sounds a lot like what I have been doing. I'm just looking at the numbers, hoping that another visitor comes and I'm not doing anything to create more content, which is my core business. In the end I believe that I can take several steps to increase my traffic but content will be number one thing that will drive people to my site. Of course though, I'm quite lazy and I'm not superman so I must develop a system where visitors are generating most of my content...Something a lot like this forum. Of course, getting numbers like this forum must be quite a challenging task. Plus, the administrators here seem to work quite hard to participate in most threads. Another option would be to allow visitors to submit articles to be published on my site. There are probably alot more options too.

So here is my first question. When Ozzu first started how did they generate traffic? Did the owners just have tons of friends and got all of their friends to join? Was it a slow process for Ozzu...starting with very few posts and slowly growing to the thousands we see today?

Ozzu has done well, But in fairness a lot of the time successful forums come about by sheer luck. There are things you can do to increase your chances of becoming a lucky forum though. You, as the administrator, should have a great understanding of the subject of your forum (Or at least know more than the people who visit.). So as ozzu is a webmaster/coding forum, bigwebmaster had knowledge in this field, So is able to provide answers to most, if not all of the initial questions asked.

Secondly, having a bunch of friends who can post will help. People are more likely to participate if the forum appears active. If this means setting up 200 names and posting under them names yourself and spending a weekend having conversations with yourself, then so be it. You have to make your forum look active.

The third thing i do is start threads answering some of the most commonly asked questions, This way you will be more likely to be found in search engines.
You can find out what are the most commonly asked questions by looking at related sites and seeing what threads get the most views.

The fourth thing is to welcome people.
The first thing people usually do is set up a "rules" thread telling people what they can't do. Rules are needed on a forum, but you don't want to look like a little hitler when you are trying to get people to join.
Change "register" to "join us".
Set up a forum for people to post when they first visit, and make sure you, as the admin, reply to these threads, appear interested in your members.

You could have rewards for people who post a lot.
Simple things like changing the colour of their user name when they reach different amounts of posts, Or add peoples sites to a banner rotation when they reach 500 posts (if its a webmaster forum).

You can also use a paid forum posting service to get your site alive! I used forumadvantage.com and they did wonders!

Are those paid posts actually quality posts or are they just useless information filling up space in the forum?

Thank you Meman for your advice. You have come to my rescue many times. It's funny that you say to take a weekend and basically have conversations with myself b/c here in my desperate hours I have thought of doing that.

i know what you mean about spending time looking at numbers. I am always looking at my figures not because im wishing they would go up ...but just because i like numbers....

One thing that I have considered doing recently is to add a script on my site homepage that shows the last 4 posts in the forum. This might add to forum participation among visitors. Unfortunately, I have no idea what sort of script that might be.

All paid post are qulity subject or not