Need advertising tips for my forum. My competition has much bigger budget
 

I work in a certain high tech industry and decided to start a forum relevant to that industry. There's one out there that was started by a big company with fortune 1000 and 500 sponsors. I know how much my company pays for advertisement on that site and it isn't exactly peanuts. While their design graphic design is fairly good, the actual forum sucks. No categories just 1 big unorganized open forum. Since they have much bigger budget though I have to get after it fast.

With that said, through my company I have about 15k contacts of people in this industry. I could utilize linkedin to promote the forum.

The idea is to get off to a good start and while I can pull some crowd of off my own, I would like to have my forum come up high in google. Does anyone know if the SEO companies pay off? How about google adwords? Preferably I would want to have some members on the forum and few discussions before I start inviting people from my contacts so that it doesn't look like they would be wasting their time.

Any help would be much appreciated..