Ok so everyone who has a minecraft server wants to get loads of players and hopefuly get a few donations and in this post I will help you as much as possible to help you.

1. Advertise on minecraft server websites such as
planetminecraft
mcserverlist
minecraft-mp

2. Be friendly to players
Doing this will encourage your players to stay and hopefuly they will donate to the server later on.

3. Dont force your players to donate
This is a bad itdea because if you do that chances are players will lave and never come back be friendly and polite at all times.

4. Make a banner
If you have a colourful banner it will encourage people to click on your server/website and there will be a higher chance that players will join.

5. Do not spam
Spamming other servers is possibly the worst thing you could do because then people who like the server you just spammed will start saying dont join this server and that is never good.

6. Have more then one thing on your server
If you just have survival chances are your server will get boring after the player has got diamonds and make diamond armour make a PvP arena or some parkour to keep your players entertained.

7. Friendly Staff
If you dont have friendly staff people will not want to play on your server because who would want to play on a server were the admins are abusing and being horrible.

8. Downtime
Try to have minimal downtime the more time your server is up the more time players have to join and play.

9. Ranks
Reward your players with free ranks lets say if a player plays 24hrs they get a trusted rank if they play 96hrs they get a loyal rank.

10. Rewards
If a player get 3 friends on say them and their friends can have a diamond each then players will want to get as many friends on as possbile and the chain will go on from there.

I hope this helped you out if there is anything you need just post a comment and I will try and awnser as best as I can for you also if you are just looking for a friendly server to play on join my server rndgaming.playat.ch