Forum Promotion (here we go again)...

[skyraider]

Hey,
I'm trying to start what I think is the first practical, realistic size adventure forum (as far as I know, lol). It's at barrennorth.com/adventure.

And, of course, the infamous traffic issue has arisen, as seemingly with most forum-based sites. My daily unique hit average was 33 at the end of January, with a total of 1046 uniques and 18,000 hits. Obviously a small percentage of people who visit actually post... I've had about four or five posts and one picture put on since October '03. Is that bad or rad? Any advice from anyone on how to get more targeted visitors who will be interested in posting?

Things I've tried:

- Meta tags & submission to many directories and search engines - currently 6th on Google for "adventure forums" (I wonder if anyone types that in besides me, hehe)

- Link exchanges with other adventure sites

- Numerous banner exchanges & 'traffic building' programs including pop-under exchanges and things like TrafficSwarm (neither seemed to be affective)

- Attaching the my site to my email & forum sigs

- Visiting other sports forums and some of the adventure forums like GORP with many categories - and posting the beginning of a story w/ a link back to my site

- Posting my site on the front page of a forum in which all the admins have also posted their sites - that actually got me 1000 hits or so.

Any advice on how I can find some people who'd like to post? Btw, I'm only 13 - therefore, a PPC campaign is kind of out of bounds at the moment in terms of monetary resources.
Thanks.