I know that there are any ways to advertise your forums for free, however more and more ways of promoting them for a fee are starting to pop up on the internet.

Has anyone ever used any of these services? Are they worth the price?

Any suggestions on advertising my forum would be appreciated.

There are many ways to advertise your forum.
The best way depends a lot on the time you have at hand, your budget, your social network, if you post on linked forums etc

If you are busy and don't have any other related forums to spread the word on for free. Then you have no choice but to go for the paid advertising

But a lot of those services who profess to advertise your forum, don't do such a good job at all. Finding the right quality service thus becomes very important

Best to use free methods at first and see if that does it for you IMHO

I have a blog that I advertise my forum on which allows a lot more exposure than using a paid service for advertising, and I also do link exchanges as well.

I don't have a forum but surely a word from blog would be helpful, even if you get to use certain social networks found online might also get some good traffic to your forum.

Stumble Upon is one of the most flexible sources for advertising. Submit your site or forum yourself, talk friends into doing it, or pay for Stumbles! The Stumble Upon has a lot of traffic. Your site or forum will definitely get noticed!

Squidoo is another free source. You can create as many pages as you like with tidbits from posts on your forum, along with links. If you are even marginally skilled at writing subtle ad copy, people will want to read more and go to your forum to do so!

If you are starting a forum, I wouldn't recommend spending too much on advertising. At least not at first. Like the people above, I would highly recommend going through all your free options first. Link exchange, adding a blog, etc... Be careful though, dont just exchange links with anyone. You could end up hurting your google rank if you swap links with a site that is spamming...

I would recommend doing what you can for free first. There are tons of people in the same situation as you, why not try and contact some of them? Do some link exchanges, and use Digg or Squidoo or Stumbleupon. Just be careful and know who is posting your link and where. You don't want to end up on some spam site and hurt your google rank.

The flexibility of a blog would allow you to kill several birds with one stone. You can sell advertising while writing topics that refer to subjects up for discussion in your forum...win/win!

Just curious - how do you get started creating a blog and selling advertising. I have been thinking about starting one, because I have lots of things I would like to share, but I don't really know what to do.

You could go through Blog Catalog, or other blog sites, and see how others approach an area you wish to write about. If you can choose a different angle on the same topics things are a little easier. Then, start writing.

Blog directories have their own requirements for the number of entries or months the blog has been active. Start with the directories that have requirements that are easiest to fulfill, and keep writing, being sure to ping your blog after each entry.

Then, once you are listed in a few directories, go over to Adbrite, and open an account, grab the code you create following their directions, and place the code in your blog.