Here are a whole lot of ideas that may or may not work, depending on your organisation.
- Build partnerships or symbiotic relationships with other communities (e.g. find related communities and have them send members your way for specialised information)
- Find guest blogging opportunities (leveraging someone else’s audience). Tools like Followerwonk scan Twitter profiles and can help you to target appropriate people to approach.
- Build your personal brand and become a thought leader in your niche so that people actively seek you out.
- Redirect existing traffic from other real estate (examine traffic to the rest of your site and put community CTAs on high traffic yielding pages.
- Not a huge fan of this one, but leveraging social media (either through posting or ads) is a successful strategy for some brands.
- Incentivise referrals (limit this to TLs so you don’t get a whole lot of crap and build in retention gates so that people get further incentives if people hit engagement targets).
- Host online events on popular topics and gate follow up information within the community.
- Offer partnership badges to organisations that you have close relationships with to put on their site, linking back to yours.
- Take advantage of reciprocity and link to other blogs in your content (the more influential, the better).
- Implement an automated onboarding series of emails that go out each week for 4 weeks. This will help to optimise your new – engagement member conversion rate.
And lastly, here is a list of Growth resources that I put together in a past role growth [The Knowledge]
Let me know if you want clarification of any of the above.