I run www.rockforums.net - simple forum setup, no frills. I'm about to take the step up and launch a CMS (content management system) around the forums. It's running Mambo and so has the ability to export RSS threads, so I'll definitely be runnins an RSS that way. Hopefully I can get enough unique content from members to get listed on sites like NewsNow, which would really bring in traffic. My board is running invision 2.0, but version 2.1 is in development; this'll feature RSS as well, where lists of recent threads can be exported to a stream, and other rss stremas can be used to create threads in the forums. Integrating the two streams, or offering my visitors a whole range of different streams to choose from, would be amazing!
RSS is great, but still - dont expect miracles. If you aren't getting any traffic, dont expect RSS will change that over night. My advice: Develop a great site with valuable visitors for your visitors and then add an RSS-Feed to publish tips, articles, newsletter - or whatever you think might be useful. Why using an RSS-Feed? A great way to communicate & stay in touch with your audience -> builds trust - gives you a chance to turn your visitors into customers. Allows you to establish yourself as the expert in your field -> again: trust & customer. You will get some additional traffic - that's always good to have Inbound link on your site - gives you bit of a ranking advantage Doesn't cost you much extra time to publish information via RSS - anyway, you have to write content for your site - all you have to do is copy/past it into your RSS Feed. Just to get started & to play around a bit, I recommend you check Blogger.com (owned by Google) - it's free and very easy to set up.