How to help a dead forum

As a admin I know it can be difficult to keep your forum active.
When you start a forum, it's active.
You probably asked a few friends to come over at the start and they're active aswell.
When you've done your first advertising campains you probably got a few new members that are active aswell
But it happens often that activity drops after a few weeks or months, and you're left with an almost dead community.
Many things can cause this... People loose interest, not enough new threads to reply to and so on...
It can be very difficult to revive such a community on your own...

Step 1: Make a bunch of new topics
Start a few topics on your forum, and try to spread them over your entire forum.
So don't only post in the "general chat" area, but also in subforums about the main topic of your forum.
Try to start discussions!
When you only post information, people will read it and leave it.
So you have to try to get some discussions, ask for feedback or ask other questions.
In your general chat forums you can start topics like "post your pic" or "favourite music".
Polls are also good!
Topics like that can be great ice-breakers.

Try to create a few new topics each day for a couple of days!

Step 2: Ask your friends
Once you've created a few new threads you can ask your friends over again.
Tell them that you created new topics and would appreciate it if they would check them out and post a few things while they're there.

Step 3: Advertise and do post exchanges
Doing post exchanges will not only increase your amount of posts and threads, but also your amount of members.
Also try to do this for a couple days...
Also get reviews and post packages for your forum from ps and take advantage of our ad services, and use the review so that you know how you could help change the image of your forum and hopefully get you some more ideas about improving your forum.

After these 3 steps you should have some activity on your forum again.
You still have a bunch of members that didn't notice the new activity on your forum, simply because they haven't visited your forum again.
So now you have to give them a reason to visit your forum...

Step 4: Install or add something new and mail all your members!
To get your members back you have to mail them... but you've got to have a reason to mail them or they could consider it spam.

Here are a few ideas:
Install a new modification on your forum
Change the layout
Start a contest
New skin
Give a new service
Ask for feedback on a specific subject
...

Once you've done this you've got a reason to send an email to all your members to notify them of the updates/changes of your forum!
At least some of them will come back to your forum to take a look at the recent changes.
And they will see all the new members and topics what you have done.

We get a lot of new members through post packages and post exchanges. The problem as you said if you don't keep the topics fresh they will leave and only the staff will be posting. That happened to me on a promo forum I ended up closing. Another way is to join any type of forum and post a few posts and put your signature in and you might get a little interest by them checking you out.

It's very hard to revive a dead forum, so keep it active and don't let it go dead in the first place.

lol. It's actually not hard. Just listen to these tips. they should do the trick.

Those are good ideas! (But truthfully, I knew those already ;D )

With all of these advice the site will always be available and easy to find when using a search engine.