I am sure that their are quite different methods for generating traffic/members for a community based site as opposed to a content based site, for example. Any tips/advice?
I run a community based site so you may enjoy several of the threads I've written, as many of them deal with promoting a forum. Namely this thread: Promote your forum with a Street Team
Well, if one has the knowledge about website optimization, the right blogging and so on, then there could be a better output for a certain website but if one has no idea about it, then better find for an SEO Firm.
What better place to find community members than at other communities.... people who participate regularly in forums love to be heard!
Find boards and other websites that have people that share the communities interests, if you can entice 20-30 people to join, and they each tell 5 friends and each of those friends tell 5 friends etc. you can build up to the 10,000 mark very quickly. I've seen it happy in many cases, the hard part is continuing the momentum. Just remember advertising is hard in those types of communities, Facebook and Myspace see less than a .043 percent clickthrough rate. So if its for profit finding the right marketing is hard.
Use Twitter/FriendFeed regularly, make good friends using these tools, you will grow your community easily with targeted audience. No need to spend money for advertising or SEO.
I run an online community also. Not sure if you use a CMS like Joomla or Drupal but I added a module to allow members to invite their friends which has brought in some extra traffic. I agree that word of mouth is crucial for community sites. I assume that your members have to register so you should have their email address, I've had luck with sending out a member wide email simply asking them to help their community grow by telling their friends on their IM buddy list, myspace, friendster, and so on. I use an internal mail system on my site so I send these messages there so I don't have to worry about email providers blocking it as spam but should still good results through regular email. If you are developing a good user base of regulars then you will start getting people in through word of mouth. One of the biggest hurdles for a community site starting out is content, and since content for a community site is basically other members starting out is rough. It's kind of a catch 22, you have to have other members in the site to keep people on the site but if you don't have any members on the site yet how can you do this? This can be extremely frustrating, but once you start getting that regular group of users established it will start to snowball pretty quick. Any community site needs to have features that hold the member's attention and keeps them in the site for more that 2 seconds and keeps them coming back. Features you need to have in a community must be interactive, almost everything should have a way for members to leave comments on and interact with each other. If your members feel like the site is actually theirs you will have a long time member. The downside of this is often times members start to get a little bossy with the site owner trying to tell them how to run the site but if you have this problem you have members so it's trivial. If it's a free site just remind those members of that and move on. One thing that did bring traffic in for me was answering related questions on Yahoo Answers. My site is focused on chat so I found questions from people asking about chat related questions and placed a link to my site in the link spot after answering the question. About half of my answers were voted as best answers so I think that helped a bit too. Another good way to bring in focused traffic is posting on forums on other community based sites. Just be careful that you aren't just spamming though or else your post's will probably just be removed and you will have just wasted your time. Of course there's always exchanging links with other websites too. Feel free to go to the site in my sig and submit your link there if you want to help get you started. Hope this helps you a bit, just remember that building a good quality website that people want to use is the best way build a successful site.