Hi Peggy, I signed up on your site to see why as you say no one's posting. Here are some observations / suggestions.
1. If I just wanted to chat with you, why would I sign up on a forum when I can find you on twitter / FB etc. The point is, almost all your forum categories show you as the main poster. This is a terrible put off. If I am on a forum, I expect people, lots of people. So even if you haven't got any, new visitors shouldn't think so. You should invent at least 4 or 5 alter egos and divide your posts between them. People who are attractive, smart, funny with cool avatars...Once real folks start posting, phase out these fake users one by one.
2. You have 77 people who have liked your FB Group. Why aren't these people being thrown in the face of new visitors? My suggestion, get a sidebar on all threads and forum pages. You may not agree with a sidebar on all threads, but if you want to start a new successful community, the most important thing to do is "Rope In" people. For that you got to throw certain information on new visitors. New visitors almost always land on some thread page and they will leave reading that thread. If however, within that short available time you show to them some very attractive people around, they
might stay.
3. For a very specific site, your categories are amazingly generic. Instead of "Entertainment", "Politics", "Sports" you should have names which ring a bell in the mind of your target audience. Use the local lingo, maybe some local references, anything to make the audience think of something familiar to them.
4. Spend money. Your forum is very specific to an area. The more specific a niche, the easier it is to get paid targeted audience. Most web hosts when you sign up give you some sort of Adwords credit. Even if you don't have Adwords credit, spend about 100-150 $ and make very specific ads for very specific keywords for the audience in your target area. Adwords over time can cost you as little as 0.05 - 0.1 $ per click or even less. These targeted people would then at least browse 4-5 pages even if they don't sign up. That gives you a much larger timeframe to make an impression.
5. After folks sign up, they land on this page
http://mahoningvalleytalk.com/register/register
That is the signup complete page. That is the one page where on any forum, you have the user's undivided attention. And that is the one page which most forums leave as default. Edit that page's template to provide interesting information/ help about your site / Like box etc.
Hope some of my suggestions help you...
