Hey,
Today i will give you the tips and tricks for gaining a community on your minecraft server. 

First off, your post.
This post is a main decider of your server's life and amount of players. This means kicking off with a thourough and well thought out description really grabs peoples attention. Within the description, user colours, bold important words and even make them bigger to stand out. Your post must also be lively and fun to read as most users are ages 10 -18 (MOST). 

For Example (This is from my server post):

Staff

Owner: 
Developer: 
Admins: 
Moderators: 
Builders: 

This really adds contrast to your post and makes it seem more appealing.

Something else to consider in your post is having quality pictures. This could be pictures of your spawn, your community and even some awesome action moments of fights or tnt blowing up etc.

Next...Advertising.

Ahh, the fatal advertisement, it has been done wrong in so many ways. The first and foremost top 1# thing you should NEVER do is SPAM ANOTHER SERVER! Doing this will decrease your amount of players....and annoy a lot of people.
So, how do you advertise? Simple....Forums. 

What are forums you ask?
Forums are an amazing tool created by gamers to share ideas, news and projects to eachother, this enables players to show other people there server, who if they like it, will share it with there friends and then they will share it with there friends and so forth. 

So, you have done these, now what? 
Well, now you play the waiting and upgrading game. This means keeping everything on your server fresh and fun for all of your players. This makes players want to come back and see all the new things you've added. With more players on, it makes more people want to join and have fun :).

Back to the forum thing again.  
With forums, create your own! Your server will thrive with a forum, a place for people to share there ideas and thoughts for the server. 

Well,
That's it for this blog.

Kind regards,
Dylan Watts
ReversePlasma

P.S Good luck!

Website: http://reverseplasma.net/
Forums: http://reverseplasma.boards.net/

My post for ideas (Don't plagerise!): ReversePlasma