First and foremost, you can advertise all over the Internet. And that’s fine if you have a plump marketing budget on top of already-spent social networking software funds. But today, let’s discuss social media traffic-building strategies aside from advertising.

Active blogging within the community is vital. Seed your own community blogs with frequent entries from a reliable source. This may not require the services of a full-time writer, but perhaps a dedicated part-time voice. Consistent quality of the content is probably more important than inconsistent, lackluster posts in great frequency.

Encourage active community members to offer relevant opinions as often as possible. Give them incentives such as prize awards, or even better, a flexible rating system that raises a member’s status in the community as they participate. The rating system should award points and display the number prominently, next to an individual’s profile image, for example.

Outside of the community, assign an administrator the role of linking to popular social sites with high-volume traffic. Over time, seeding of multiple links will produce results on destinations such as StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn. 

Keep the registration for your community as simple and fast as possible. At the same time, give new members optional profile questions to answer to help empower their identity in the site. Be creative and fun with the questions. If you do, your new registrants will have fun with them, too. Later, after the answers have generated profile tags, curious browsers will be able to browse and view another member’s profile info in a one-click step. This generates Friending activity.

Another rewarding strategy that will help draw visitors to a fledgling community is search engine optimization (SEO). Prior to deployment, community administrators (or managers) should be vigilant about optimizing keywords in all of the tabs, heads and subheads. Careful thought should help specify titles that search engines will respond to. 

After launch, after researching and identifying the best keywords for your brand’s SEO, frequent outreach on the web should leverage these same keywords. In other words, building traffic starts pre-launch with intelligent SEO decisions, and continues indefinitely with linking efforts based on extended keyword research.

For any community, especially one without an overwhelming brand identity, success comes down to smart management. Along with reaching out by linking to sites that will link back to yours, community managers need to connect online with every possible expert in your field or industry. Inspire these leaders to believe in your goals and to help promote your social community.

Administrators of your site can also host all types of traffic-building events regularly in the community. One distinct advantage is your ability to advertise these happenings in your own site for very little cost. Whatever the event is...contest, competition or prize-winning challenge...invite your most active members directly to participate. Promote the event with persistence and make sure the activities leading up to it are fun and persuasive.

Finally, focus on marketing your community online with podcasts and webinars. At the same time, every so often, move out of the virtual world and attend a real-world event. Make these an opportunity to collect content for use on the site, and to connect with potential members. However you approach your plans for sparking community growth, your efforts should be well-planned, energetic and uninterrupted.

We welcome your comments if you have thoughts about boosting traffic in a social media community.