I am one of those very lucky admins who comes built in with a group of writing friends who follow her just about everywhere, so I have never been in the unenviable position of having to open a board with only one character. However, I consistently have trouble attracting new blood. Now, I know that I have niche games that will never rise to huge HUGE numbers (and I really am totally okay with that), but I'm not at all sure how to improve otherwise.

I'm not having trouble with activity, necessarily -- my twenty or so players keep themselves all pretty entertained, and that's awesome -- but I'd like to know what suggestions y'all have for attracting people outside of their comfort zone. And by suggestions, I'm specifically looking for things outside of and apart from advertising -- I mean things on the board itself to make people stay rather than just clickthrough. A great deal of any website's traffic is a single hit that's then immediately discarded, and I'd like to work on that ratio.

My board only has me at the moment, and one person considering joining. I have folks I could tap, but I really wanted to see if I could do it on my own...without my 'buddies' from other sites. Does that sound odd?

I'm having a similar problem. I have a solid member base at the moment which is pretty active, but once I hit around 30 members it leveled off. Most of those members were friends of friends who joined. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to draw from a wider crowd. I've been advertising and all of that, but like you said, most of the guests we get in a day don't translate into members, and i'm wondering how to improve on that.

Firstly, I suggest you make sure that your board doesn't seem like a clique. While it may not be your intention--or the intention of the players--you guys may have started to drift toward cliqueyness. Or at least you appear a bit on the cliquey side if you all know each other. (I'm not saying you are; it just may look that way from a new member's perspective.)

Secondly, do you have adequate information that allows new members to jump right in? Oh, how about some sort of buddy program so that the new members buddy up with one of the older members so that the new member won't feel so lost? I've seen those before and I think they're kind of cool. It gives the new members a sense of belonging.

Thirdly, ask your members what they think you should do about it. I'm sure they'll have a lot of suggestions that are more specific to your board because they know your board far better than I do.

I hope this helped. If not...oh well? :p

I used to run a pretty popular Harry Potter RPG about 3 years ago. It was small, but it was pretty active and I was very happy with it. At the same time I was involved with the blog/forum scene and I think I can attribute my forum's success to being apart of that. If you happened across a blog that had a HP layout or was owned by someone who liked HP, they did not find it annoying that you dropped a link in a comment. In terms of forums, they always had a link directory of sorts. The good thing about the forums, was that they were general all-around boards. Sadly, I have found myself quite detached from the blog and forum scene, so attracting members to my new RPG is proving to be a tad more difficult.