I wrote this article last night for the proboards support forum, I think your viewers may also find some of this useful too.
It is unfinished and I will be adding more tips and tricks over time. It is quite lengthy, to the point it's unfinished as I got tired writing it.
I hope you enjoy and can take some tips from this.
 
Becoming Relevant
To become relevant, you must ask these five(5) questions.

• what is your niche is all about
  
• what is trending in your niche
  
• what are people talking about in your niche
• what is popular in your niche
• are people searching for topics on your niche

You must first answer all of these questions if you want to build a sustainable community of followers(and potential buyers).

So lets see if we can answer them. Lets try and do some tests to see if we could test the "james bond" niche for demonstration purposes.

what is your niche is all about ?
Well I presume your creating a forum because you have an interest and understanding about the topic/niche you will be creating a community for, right? You can also check other fan/wiki/official websites for additional information about the subject. Never pick something that is too broad, "film/music/gaming" etc as most big companies already own the search engine(paid advertising) and social media space for those. So you forum will most likely never be found.


what is trending in your niche ?
We could use social media to see what is trending and we will but first, let me introduce you to google trends if your not already familiar. If we type "James Bond" in the google trends search bar, we get provided with a chart of "interest over time", "regional interest" and "related searches". The line chart is a little sporadic, this tells me the query is searched for seasonally, OR in our case I would take a guess and say it gets searched more often when a new movie comes out. Another thing I noted was in the "Related Searches" it gives me additional queries I could test. "james bond movies" sticks out to me as it is not as broad as "James Bond".

what are people talking about in your niche ?
Lets see what the social networks are saying. I am just going to use #twitter in this test case, but you could test the others too. So lets head over to twitter search and enter "James Bond" as our query. ...Well we know its relevant as people are talking about it. We kind of figured that, however your niche might not be so popular, so it may give you a better insight.

what is popular in your niche ?
A simple google search could tell us this, however we want to make sure we select the "News" tab and not the default "web". This will tell us what the media(news|papers) are saying about the subject. We can also come back here later and use this as inspiration for writing a new thread, why? It's relevant!
Remember when creating or curating content, its all opinion based, forums and blogs are all opinion based. You don't need to copy an article but you can give your opinion on said article that is currently trending. You can then ask your viewers opinion on the thread you wrote, this will engage the viewer(people LOVE to be asked their opinion)

Are people searching for topics on your niche ?
If you are unsure if your niche is getting any hits in the search engines, you can first do a broad search. The tool we will be using is Google Keyword Tools There are many tutorials on how to use this tool on youtube.

[more on keyword tools later]

Our niche looks like a go, so for this we will create a fictional pro boards account and we will use "james bond movies" as our niche. 


URL:
james-bond-movies.proboards.net
Please note this is a fictional url and is not working to my knowledge, apologies if any one is in fact using this url.

Before you go about setting up your new forum design, make sure you go over and create a gmail account(you will need this for additional tools such as console|keyword tools|analytics|alerts).

Next, head over to Google Alerts and create some alerts for you content. In my case I would create alerts for:


This will send notifications to my gmail account every time those words are mentioned on the web! It helps me keep up to date with trending topics as well as anytime someone mentions the forum url.

Design your forum how you will and be sure to create your console account and Analytics account(VERY IMPORTANT!!)
Be sure to add the required "meta" tags and code to your templates.


Setting up Goals
Google Analytics helps use track our pages as a whole but we can also create goals. Goals are helpful for teaching us how people are interacting on the forum. After we create a new thread and wish to share it, google will index it eventually!!!! We need to make some noise for them to take notice quicker. Google does not index websites, it indexes pages(threads/posts), so we must do this for each new page we create.

We make noise by getting people to talk about our new thread, we need Social Signals(likes|Shares) as well as back-links(other forums or blogs linking to the new thread).

How do you do this? You need to build relationships with people. On Social Media, on Blogs Or Forums you comment on.

So we need to share our new thread BUT we also want to track it. I won't lie, this can be tedious as we need to create a new link for each (social|email|forum) platform . So in turn our one(1) new thread could have 5+ unique links for it. Lets take a look. Write down your thread link
Next, head over to Link Builder and enter the details for each link we want to create.




.....and so on.

After you create each of those links, write them down. They are way too long to post on twitter(for example) so we will use a url shorten service like Bitly . Bitly also provides some some link analytics, but we need on-page(thread) analytics, which is why we are using link builder.

Social Engagement
In order to reach people to show your awesome new links to, you need to find them. Traffic is good but Targeted Traffic is better! People who are targeted are more likely to join your forum or add you as a friend/group.

Lets start with twitter. Use the search functionality and search again for [#yourniche]. Look around at a few profiles and find out who is already popular. We are going to piggyback them. Head over to Tweepi and create and account. Find the "follow followers" option and enter their username @popularperson, now browse their friends and start following people who look to share the same interest(some could just be friends). You are capped at 200 a day, but do this everyday for a month and you should get quite a few follow backs(targeted followbacks, people who will have an interest in your forum).

For Facebook, you need to find groups and request to join those and engage with people that way. 

Reaching People
Don't EVER try to sell something OR force someone to look at your url, Social Media is for socializing alone! You will reach people eventually and start building relationships.

PICTURES are essential for social media so be prepared to get your hands dirty. If you are inept at creating graphics, you could try a service like Canva

Good luck guys and gals! I wish your forums all the best.

[more to follow]