Anyone have tips on starting a forum community?

How do you convince people to post in forums on a brand new website?..  Should I create fake profiles and make my forums look active?  I don't have many members (about 70).  Most of them join and sign right out lol

To make the forum more visible, if you want i have a module in the market to see the forum posts with the avatar on the index of the site.. http://www.boonex.com/m/forum-posts-with-avatar-on-index-page

Thanks, but I was mostly just looking for ways to engage current users.  The site is just over a month old.  Soo it's dead.  They join, see it's dead, and leave lol.  I put a forums rss feed on the member.php page so they see it as soon as their logged in.  I just need some site activity

While this post is over a month old; I stumbled across it in a search, I thought I would add what we did when we set up our site.  One of the admins went through the forum setting up boards on a variety of topics; trying to cover a wide range of interests, and created a starter topic in each one.

My advice  - dont start loads of topics... just a couple - even one!

Make it something that people want to post in - introduce yourself etc.. tell the best joke (if your site is a joke site...) or something else focused on the niche theme of your site (if it has one). 

Then make sure you reply if needed to each post to keep it active. 

IF this gets people to post, then why not ask them what forum features they would find useful and most likely to use. 

Might be that they would want something different to your initial ideas... all depends on what sort of community you have and its focus...

In my experience, forums can be difficult to start up, but  giving that you have a core of 70 users, it should be possible. Just need to be streamlined about it and make the forum 'feel' like the users own it. That's important.