I tried to keep the title short, but my issue is a bit more complicated than just asking how to get traffic to some random forum community. I recently started a forum-based community focused on discussing mental-health related topics such as sex, drugs, and relationships mostly targeted at youth. It is about a month old but I feel like it may just fizzle out to nothingness of it doesn't get a boost in traffic soon. There are only a couple of active members and I'm essentially out of traffic boosting ideas. I write a unique and rather high quality article (in my opinion) every single day and post it to the front page. The site is already listed in the major search engines and I've dabbled in a few advertising methods, both paid (Google Adwords, StumbleUpon ads) and free (submitting to social bookmarking sites like Digg, politely spreading the word on the forums I am active on). I have managed to get okay traffic (an average of 59 visits and 1819 hits per day for this month so far, according to webalizer), but there is little actual activity other than what I am posting. I feel like it is a chicken-and-the-egg problem. If the site magically had more traffic, I would be able to feed off that to provide better unique content (both in quantity and quality) which would then bring in more visitors and etc. But it seems like a closed circle that I can't manage to break into. How do I get that first bunch of active members that help me draw in future active members? I don't have a whole lot of money to spend on paid advertising, especially since I'm not looking to make money with this website (I'm studying psychology in college and this is a personal project of mine, not a business). I also don't want the website to be all clogged up with reciprocal links all over the place. Thanks in advance.