[misticjeff]

Not sure what I want to say but here goes....

I own and operate www.misticriver.net it is now the largest iriver mp3 player community on the net. I started it out of necessity for information in Nov. 03 and it has now grown to 28,000+ members, listed in the top ten of google searches for "iriver".

2005:
over 1.7 million unique visitors
over 62 million page views
over 280 million hits
over 1,920 gigs of bandwidth

Strong content and good moderation are the keys to get things started in my opinion. You also need content that folks want and need. Very hard to start a community without solid content.

For advertising, start with google ads right away. Free, easy and can bring in a fair amount of funding.

I have a subscriber user group on my site and run contests for them only. The cost to become a subscriber is only $12US for one year. Funny enough I only have 108 subscribers!! I'm currently running a contest giving away two iriver mp3 players worth a total of over $500US. You can of course start smaller which I did in the beginning.

Time, time, time... it just takes time and a lot of hard work.

Oh yeah... and install the Welcome Headers Hack. It really helped on my site.
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=99579

Jeff