Just choose one or two people who are interested in your topic, who you respect and admire and would make good contributors to your board. Don't send a personal message to everyone - just a few selected people.

Be sure your message board has been submitted to search engines, just like any other web site or web page. You will want to get it into top engines (these include Google, Altavista, Hotbot, Excite and others).

You can also reference your board within your newsletter (you do send out a newsletter, don't you?) and as part of your email signature. I would not bother with FFA (Free For All) lists, paid advertisements and banner exchanges. My experience is these promotional methods require a lot of work for a small gain.

You should be promoting your board just as hard as you would promote your web site, ebook and ezine. Each of these is a separate element and can be promoted separately as well as together.

In summary, your board can be a very useful part of your overall promotional strategy. Message boards are extremely useful in getting people to return to your web site many times, but in order to be useful they must be promoted heavily and constantly. If you do so, then you may find your board will take on a life of it's own and become as popular (or even more so) than your web site.

*Search Engines

You should manually submit to top search engines. You should also get listed in minor engines and any directories you can find on other sites. Get listed in as many places as you can(except possibly FFA pages). I prefer not to place my ad on some of these FFA pages. Here are top search engines:

Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com

Alta Vista - http://www.altavista.com/av/content/addurl.htm/

Excite - http://www.excite.com/info/add_url/

Lycos - http://www.lycos.com/addasite.html/

Hotbot - http://www.hotbot.com/addurl.asp/

Infoseek - http://infoseek.go.com/AddUrl?pg=SubmitUrl.html/

Northern Light - http://www.northernlight.com/docs/regurl_help.html/

WebCrawler - http://www.webcrawler.com/info/add_url/

Do not submit to these too often, you could be banned. Every three to four weeks is often enough.

*Announcement Lists

There are hundreds of announcement list where you can announce your website or your ezine or business opportunity. Make sure you follow rules for submitting your ads to each list. You can find some of these lists at:

http://www.egroups.com http://www.listbot.com http://www.globelists.com http://www.milomail.com

When you have a website or ezine, you have to spend a lot of time promoting. As you promote, you will learn more about different ways you can do this on internet. You must keep at it and do not give up when things look bad. It takes time to get your business established online. Doing these things I have listed will help you spread word!