Growth strategy

I have just made a new site. The idea is that it connnects members based on their interests and location. I thought it filled a niche in the social networking arena and all those that have joined so far seem very pleased with it. We are just struggling to grow it past 20k members.

Any tips for growth?

Umm have you tried using PPC such as adwords to help promote ?

Article sites can hit big traffic and get good SE rankings bud. Just include a link to your site and a short description and you'll be reet.

Do like myspace and facebook did when they started and encourage your existing members to do your recruiting for you.

Create a simple form you're members can fill out to email an invite request to their friends. Set up some type of incentive to encourage them to invite more friends. You could set up some type of status for members that recruited x number of members. Give them additional priviledges, a free ebook related to your sites niche, or anything else you think would get your existing members to help build the forum.

Hmm...you surely can use some branding, mate. Brand that site and make it public. Put it like ...everywhere from forums to FB, Twitter and MyS. All you need is guts and a bit of creativity. I pushed all my sites as far as I could, and the guys doing my SEO made sure I am present all over the web. Behind traffic , users and subcribers is nothing but high quality links optimized for all search engines from Google to Bing.