How long did it take to get large amount of traffic?

A couple of months? Years? When I say large amount of traffic, I mean from queries on search engines and such like.

How was your community beforehand? Did you only have 10 or so active members? More or less?

 

It took my community about 6 months to see 1k daily visitors amnd over 6k pageviews. It took us awhile because we had to build the foundation with a lot of different content. We rarely advertise, we just use signature links and getting links from games in our community to help us out. We've also ran three $100 posting contests that helped us build traffic.

 

1k UVs daily in 6 months is pretty amazing to me!
I would be happy with that in 12 months.

I wish you even more luck with your site for the next 6 months

 

Depends what you consider a large amount of traffic. What's considered a lot of traffic for a site depends significantly on the site niche/subject. As does how long it'll take you to get it.

Assuming by the topic you mean a decent amount of daily activity, that didn't take me particularly long.

 

After a year, I stopped advertising, and the vast majority of new traffic was from search engines.

Since I ran a state specific forum, I asked the admin and owners of national forums, if I can link there.... send pm's, etc.

Worked.

 

Over all, has advertising proven to be effective for the money and effort involved in it?

 

I've never used paid advertising, and I don't think it's ever caused me too many issues.

I think you can advertise a forum or website perfectly well for free.

 

It certainly depends on the subject of your forum.

It took me 1 year to have 40000 visits (awstats) per month.

It took longer than expected but running a forum is something I really like

 

Totally agree on this, obviously if your Niche is small the your user base is less so theirs less attention to attract to your site.

What is your niche Sylvain if you don't mind sharing?
40k per Month is a nice steady amount at just over 1.2k per day ;-)

 

My forum is toys/hobby related and focus on one brand/manufacturer.

This is the first month with 40k visitors, maybe this has something to do with summer.

 

I'm hoping with some fresh new backlinks, my traffic from search and referrals will increase. Currently we get about 50% traffic from search and the rest from type-ins and referrals.

 

I don't get that, and it's been longer then 6 months for me. However, my niche is very competitive, and it's really only the top forums that get most of the traffic. I think you have the only forum in your niche now as you destroyed the competition.