How can I get my forum noticed and what can I improve on?

The basis is to provide a place for people to discuss topics on various things about anything that has to do with Sonic the Hedgehog, retro video gaming, and free discussion about stuff in general. It isn’t easy to find a lot of time to work on the forum cause of college, but from time to time I post reviews on games. I have to do a lot of work that I dont have time for. I’m trying to keep the forum neat and navigable for people to navigate through and to provide friendly service to the users of the community. The only problem is getting my site noticed. The existing users know that it has a lot of potential but finding it isn’t easy as 1-2-3. I need to get my url posted everywhere, advertise a banner, or get affiliation. I have staff positions available for a script writer and plenty of slots for game reviewers to review classic games on any platform from the 32-bit era and below. Just need members to keep the topics coming. I also play SRB2 online to interact with the users at times.
I submitted my forum to about over 20 search engines with plenty of meta tags and my pages have been getting crawls here and there.

There are lots of other gaming and sonic sites out there but most of their affiliation programs require a high amount of activity, users, posts, or high quality content, which isn’t in my budget as of yet.