I have found this to be quite effective. To get your article or picture noticed, just tell your friends and family about it. Send them an email or give them a link to your content. Ask them to share it with their friends too, if your friends and family like the content, they will keep on sharing and sharing with other family members. Eventually a lot of people will know about your content and you will get a lot of page views (in theory).
Another method you can try is to set your email signature be the link of the content. Whenever you send an email, the link will be down at the bottom. If your friends are curious to where the link leads, they will click on it.
You can also do the same thing for forums. You can put the link to your content on the signature on your emails and also on the signature of forums. An example of a signature is below
