You can attract visitors to your website in many different ways, but free forum is found to be the most suitable and effective tool for that purpose. It helps to not only get people to visit your site but also revisit it many times. Of course, you must make sure you give them quality content, if you want them to come again and again. But, it's not as easy as it sounds to incorporate a free forum on your site. You must have a lot of time, patience and enthusiasm.
If you want to know more and create your own forum, you must visit http://makeforum.org/home.php.
You must know that it is meaningless to add new forums in your site with no members and no posts. It will not work in a vacuum. So, the million-dollar question is: how to attract members and posts? The catch word is content. You can attract visitors and lure them to become members only if you post quality content. The better the quality of content you have, the more visitors will gravitate towards it. Also, provide a feedback link to the visitors to get regular updates from them and know their views.
There are forums that offer special advertising options and other incentives to active members who frequent the forum. The options can be in the form of text links or banners. These members are prompted to start their own discussions chains to avail of the free advertising options. You also hold a lucky draw to pep up regular users.
Everyday, there are new forums coming up on the Internet. You can work with them to source content for your website forum. It will be a give and take affair. For example, you cannot just take content from them. You need to post in theirs too. If you are cash rich, then you can invite people to start discussions on your forum by luring them with cash incentives. Here you would need to do a thorough quality check in terms of the content. In addition, you must ensure that the visitors are not doing a copy paste from other forums.
If you do not have a huge budget or if you find that you cannot attract people to start discussion on your forum in anyway, the last option for you is to 'clone' yourself and start various threads of discussions yourself. Once you do this, the other visitors will get out of the 'somebody -needs-to start-a-discussion-first syndrome'.
This is only to initiate a discussion. Once the people get going you can exit quietly and let the community grow by itself. As in real life so in the free forum discussion, the toughest part is the initial warm up stage. Once that is done, building an online community is easy enough. You will need to take the reins in your hand in the beginning. Then your free forum will grow and flourish on its own with a little prodding once in a while.