There's probably no limit to the number of possible approaches to building up your vocabulary of kanji. One way that's definitely helped me acquire more is organizing them into a relational database — so to speak, mixing and matching characters that share common attributes.
To demonstrate how this works, let's review some of the many characters using 手偏 (tehen, the classifier for hand).
Written 手 and read te or shu, the character for hand itself resembles a stick-figure representation of (in descending order) a thumb, four fingers and a wrist. It belongs to the category of kanji called 象形 (shōkei, pictograms). Classifiers representing parts of the body also include 口 (kuchi/ kō, mouth); 目 (me/moku, eye); 耳 (mimi/ji, ear), 足 (ashi/soku, leg); 髪 (kami/hatsu, hair on the head); 鼻 (hana/bi, nose); 歯 (ha/shi, tooth) and 毛 (ke/mō, hair other than on the head). Be careful with this last one; at first glance it almost looks like a reverse image of the character for hand.