Hi, I just started a forum last week and things are going pretty well but I want to accellerate it's growth as best as possible. Right now my main source of traffic is from helping people on Yahoo answers. I have 9 members and ~150 uniques a day. I also have a bunch of original articles spread across 50 or so threads. It's only been up for a week, btw. I'm wondering if it would make sense to build a website around the forum. Do search engines have a preference for websites over forums? What I would do is take each article and give it a page, and bring them all together with an index-like homepage. Also, on the forum I have a board where there are different products related to the theme for people to buy. Would I see better results from placing ads/reviews of these products on the webpages I would make for the articles? Thanks for any help/tips you can give me!
Will you able to manage both the forum and the website? Focus on getting people who will become regulars. Offer something interesting in the forum like free advertising for a month. Use Google Adwords and other sources to spread the word out.