How the hell do you get people to a site?

[New Joe]

I started a site and did nothing apart from make it look good for what it was for.
The site's content is the same as a few other sites with a kind of small community
In one year there's been 10 posts by real members, everything else came from me.

I started another site where no one or no other Forum content was the same as mine, but there was a call for such a site.
Google and the search engines did their job and a year later it's a nice busy site.