man, this is probably way more detail than anyone wanted to know, but whoops, i've always been the ad mod on sites i was part of, so i've really put a lot of thought into how to go about advertising """better""".

and to that end, i think it's less important to ask how often you advertise and instead ask what your goal is out of advertising.

if you're just generally looking for traffic, stuffing regular advertisements onto any site you can (and onto tumblr ad spots) is the way to go. i'd personally wait at least two weeks or until your ad falls off the first page before reposting (to avoid spamming a site excessively), but bare minimum, you'll get the traffic back in linkbacks. affiliating will have slower returns in that regard, but it'll also help towards that end.

if you're looking for recruitment, this is where you'll want to start looking on where to prioritize your efforts. putting + bumping ads on resource sites, responding to site searches that your site reasonably fits to (and you do want to be cautious about this since spamming them where you're bending + twisting your site to fit will see some people striking your site off as a consequence), and focusing your ads + affiliates towards sites that are likely to share similar demographics (so for a yugioh site, it'd be animanga generally and any 'mon or ""childhood nostalgia"" fandoms specifically). you can also try listing your discord server on disboard, though you might get a lot of people who are more used to discord rp + will be on a steep learning curve for a forum.

if you're more looking to bring on long-term members, in my experience, the vast majority of the time, you tend to get them less from generally advertising as much as you do from word of mouth from your existing members (which makes sense because imo it's a lot easier to get your foot in the door somewhere if you already know someone there + a lot easier to want to stick around when you've got solid people offering you the kind of plots you're wanting to play out). unfortunately, this is something that's entirely hit or miss and impossible to really advertise for, so you just gotta power through and hope you get lucky. site search respondents can also fall into this category, if you're pitching the """perfect""" site to them, but that's also p hit or miss, so. yeah.


or to summarize with your questions.
1) i advertise when i'm in the mood to + the site has enough recent activity that the ads won't be the only thing in the recent posts / active threads list; i try not to readvertise on a site unless it's been a few weeks or i'm off the first page
2) i prefer to advertise on resource sites + ad directories and sites with some demographic crossover with mine (like other animanga sites for animanga), with focus being placed more heavily on resource sites + sites in the same genre niche
2a) i also won't advertise on sites that have age-restrictions turned on for their ad boards since by default that will weed out a lot of guests who aren't gonna bother checking a box just to see a site ad + i've been heavily de-prioritizing proboards sites now because of the vigilink thing since it's the same concept of "most people ain't gonna jump through a bunch of extra hoops just for a site ad"
3) resource sites yes (since they don't allow reposts), normal rp sites no; i also "repost" the ad in the bump for a proboards site (since it'll show on the recent posts list)
4) while some people would say you're never done advertising, personally i'd put it at "when the site is at a point that you don't feel the need to actively expand it much beyond the current community you have" (since you can always be more aggressive about it later on if you change your mind)
5) my heart and soul desperately long for the days that jcink guest posting was just 6 alphanumerics you had to pull from an image