The best way I can see to earn enough merits and ranked up (without doing any abused in the system, e.g farming merits from alts) is to assure that you are posting a high-quality content. Make your post helpful, logical, and unique as necessary. By doing so, you will be able to earn merits, might not be from the community (because not everyone exerts effort to click that +merit button) but you can submit your post to bill gator or actmyname's thread review and merit rewarding.