How to get my Minecraft server to take off?

I'm trying to get my server really popular. It has 160 slots, and I've advertised it on planetminecraft.com, mcserverlist.net, and minecraftforum.net. I got up to an average of 10 people. It's a PvP server.

The annoying thing is, after I advertise it and about 10 people join, they're all like "i like this sever because it dosent have many people in it" "servers with to many people are bad". Is there just a way I can get it popular? Re-advertising it is annoying and against the rules.

Then after about 10 people join, half of them leave. So then it's basically how it was afterwards. I don't really think I'm doing a bad job with the server. The spawn is really nice, it has a good PvP arena, and it has a good mob arena.

How can I get it so the server is almost always full? (the server doesn't lag at all either)