I was just reading a thread about how hard it is to get people to sign up for your forums.
Well its not that hard if you do it this.
Open a blog and post content. Post some nice video's and pics, dont hold back, bw is cheap and you need to get as many returning visitors as possible.
Do this for a month. Try to update once a day. Do a few link exchanges and within a month you should have some decent traffic coming to your blog daily.
Now open a forum at a subdomain
www.blog.com/forum and start posting free shit there as well, as much as possible to get it started. Keep the forum free for everybody. People dont need to sign up to check the content.
Lower your updates on the blog to once every 2 or 3 days so more people will start checking the forum as well.
Do this for 2 weeks or so. Few people will become a member because they can download everything anyway.
But then after 2 weeks make the forums member only and on your blog start making posts about your forum and show preview thumbs of what is posted on your forum.
The day you make it member only you will see a 500% increase of people signing up. Why? Because theyve seen it for free for 2 weeks and know its worth signing up. More members = more posts and you got your forum going.
Now you can either leave it on the subdomain or move it to a dedicated domain.
Simply redirect the sub url to the new url.
i didnt check for grammar mistakes so cry me a river if its bad engrish.