Its not as easy as it used to be, First you should make your server different then the rest offer something that the rest don't have if you don't expect to wait awhile to grow your community, Next you should have votifier and setup an account on minestatus, mineservers.net and minecraft-servers-list. (their are many more voting websites)
Voting helps promote the server on these list, making it a higher rank in these list (trust me it works)Encourage players to vote by offering some rewards every time they vote their is an automatic system for this (VoteRoulette), You can also pay a couple hundred dollars to make your server appear at the very top of these websites. You should also get a nice banner to help draw players in, a lot of players just scroll past the servers that have no banners.
