Well, generally the way to get these started is to just sign in and idle in there, all day if necessary. As more people are in there idling constantly, its more likely that, when somebody signs in to chat, they'll have somebody to chat with.
This is why I was asking if it was a normal IRC channel; I leave my IRC clients running all day, signed onto various chatrooms (specifically the ocremix.org one and various spinoffs thereof); if I'm going to sign in and idle, it's much more convenient to do so from in IRC client.
When you were setting up the chatroom, did you have to specify a host? Or a channel name?
Host is probably either chalkbucket.com or irc.chalkbucket.com (but that's just a guess -- I'm assuming you're hosting the chat here on your server). You may have had to specify a channel name; these usually start with a # (for example, the ocremix.org chatroom is #ocremix, on irc.enterthegame.com), though if you used a wizard to set it up, it may have done that step for you.
See if you can find out the host address and the channel title, and if you can post those (assuming it does function like a normal IRC chat) I can type up a brief IRC tutorial if you need it.