The numbers work against you, for a while. People see a forum with 25 members (or 100 members) and think, "bah, there is no one here." Later, when you have 5,000 members, people sign up more than expected, just because the place looks thriving.

You're not being patient, but that's OK. You're lucky to have 200 posts. That's an average of 10 posts per member. I have one forum which averages about 1 post per member. And really, it pans out like this: about 10% of my members have posted a LOT, and the rest don't post at all.

For me, there were two awful lulls when I tried to start my most recent forum. The first lull was the period you're in -- the first month. I was relying on friends to post, and I didn't have a lot of good advertising yet, and things moved slowly. Then they picked up... until I hit 120 members. Something happened, which I still don't understand, but getting from 120 to 150 members was like pulling teeth. I can still pull up my memberlist and see the signup dates, ugh. Some days I got zero or one signup.

The good news is that the second lull forced me to act. That was where I hunkered down and tried to figure out EVERYTHING Google was doing. I learned to play up the Google strengths, did better ads, improved keywords, made my pages SEO friendly, even found some competitors and studied what they were doing and tried to beat them at their own game. Now, on a good weekday, I'll get 35 new members. On a slow weekday, I'll get 6 or 7.

Aside from Google, another great way to get people to your site is your sig. However, it only works on sister-sites. You know, if your site is about dogs, your sig will not get clicked on a car forum. But it will get clicked a lot on a forum about pets. Also, you have to be a bit heartless with your time. You'll probably find a lot of forums about a given subject, but probably only three or four will have a huge amount of traffic. You really need to save most of your time, and most of your insightful, useful comments for the big forums (and for your own). Get the most bang for your buck, so to speak.

-Tony

i just joined your site

but um im not gonna join any site with the word fetish in it my mom goes to check my search history (ive been involved with some bad shit and its not porn coughbombbuildingcough) and sees that doesnt actually look at it and i touch a keyboard til im eighteen

PS it usaully takes a year before a forum takes of and is like 1000 members if you are using phpBB then put adsense in the header and footer to make a little cash and then that will give you some cash to advertise with (by links on ebay)