How can I get more traffic? Please dont say twitter and facebook because you need loads of friends and followers.
If I had a social network site, I guess I would do this: - Try some trivial things like google ads, facebook ads, benners, etc. - Get some interesting original content and post it for discussion. E.g., you can try to do some research that doesn't exist yet, make an experiment, etc.. It might seem that this is impossible but in reality there are lots of interesting topics in many areas that haven't been covered yet. E.g. if this were a community for people who love teas, you could purchase some tea of different harvests: winter, autumn, spring, summer and then write an interesting article about your impressions. So that a new person could read this and decide which harvest the person is likely to like. You can do a video version of your research and post it to youtube, for example film those teas while describing what are the visual differences between those harvests. At the same time you can browse tea forum and sites like Yahoo answers and post links to that research whenever you find relevant questions and discussions. Eventually people would like to tell their own opinions, ask questions, etc.. Organize it in a way that would make it easy to start a discussions, for example if it's a forum, I would post these articles as new forum threads. - Don't make users go through registration, people hate filling in boring forms, captchas, remember their new username and password, etc. IMHO Facebook connect does magic here, I would call it a must have thing. It allows your users to register and sign in with a single click: they click "connect" button and their profile gets imported from FB. - If you are using Joomla or phpBB, you can also consider this tool: Activity Traffic Generator. It will help you make your site look busy and not scare away your potential users with an empty social network site. - I heard from other people that giving something away helps a lot. Getting back to our tea example, you could purchase some interesting/rare tea or tea pot and make a contest like "write a review about your favourite tea and you can win this tea pot" or "those who register this month can win" and so on.
Article marketing, linking the article back to your social network page, start of writing 3 articles a day and then after 7 days bump it up to 6 and do this for 30 days and I guarantee you will see an influx in traffic