If you have made it this far then you must be the proud new owner of a community site that is ready to start accepting new community members. I know from experience that you did not go this far to start a community that will only ever have 100 users. You, like everyone else, would like very much to start building a social network that gets 100,000 or more active users. Ten thousand users is considered a success. One hundred thousand concurrent users and you might be able to sell your community to someone else. Hit a million and you can scream WOO HOO!

To get that many users to your site will require several things. It means that you will have to have a great new concept for your site. Something that really makes it stand out as different. It will require excellent marketing skills either by way of viral marketing or through a more traditional marketing campaign. It will also mean that your site will need to stand up under a heavy daily load of users continuously until...