Started a forum, how do I grow it?

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Has anyone here ever started a forum of their own? What was your success level? My thinking is an active forum will lead to more views for the main site. It's in its infancy, and I've been actively advertising but that only does so much.

What do you guys recommend? I'm doing a giveaway right now and that helps, even if most of the members joined and posted solely for the chance at winning.

Also, if anyone else here has a forum of their own that needs activity, I propose a post exchange. You sign up for mine and make a certain number of posts and I'll do the same for yours.

http://www.portableplatypus.freeforums.org

Well, I'm not sure if that's the right way to do it. If your main site isn't getting as much traffic as you wish, there won't be enough people around to start a successful forum community. I made a forum of my own once, for my guild in a MMORPG (not the GM, but nobody else knew how), and it had around 7 regular posters. They were all regular posters in the main forum, looking for a more private place to talk, so it wasn't hard to get started with the posting. I believe that a forum should have value by itself, and exist for itself, instead of being a tool to get more traffic in a main website, so you might be using the wrong approach there.

I think you have to have a central idea or subject matter that will attract like-minded people or something people are passionate about to start. Either something that is going to help people in some way or something controversial is probably your best bet. Most sites end up dying before they end up get up and started. You can link your site through social sites, have content that is going to get you traffic (again the more controversial the better), and spam similar websites if you think your site is unique in some way that would create traffic flow to yours.