Making money with my website

I started with youtube because I thought there would be a lot of money in that but after 8,000 views and 115 subscribers and only having made about .75 cents I decided I needed something else. So I created a website with a google adsense leaderboard at the top, and an addynamo leaderboard at the bottom. My method right now is using hit leap(using the desktop viewer to get more views) to get some visits, and posting a link to my site around in relevant areas. My website has a forum to try and Maintain a community, but this site is only about a week old so I'm not expecting much of it yet.

Addynamo shows the visits buts hasn't given me anything yet.
Adsense trys to seem like its only cpc, but I generate about .02(2 cents) a day from cpm.(some days I get .30 to .60 cents)

What are some effective ways to get users to visit my site and register in the forum? The subject of the site has a strong community but does have it's loud negative speakers. I would love to see an active community on my forum, can others who have created forums tell me how long it took their community to grow?

I have a forum that's grown to around 50k members at the mo after 4 years of running. Admittedly only about 1k of them are currently active, but that's still enough to have fresh content every few minutes.

Great thing about forums is your users build and promote your content for you. If you can build up a good community feel to your site, you'll get plenty of members and contribution from word of mouth alone.

Downside to forums are they require constant care and moderation. If you reach a reasonable size you can get members to do this for you for free, providing they get "title"... but until then you'll be doing this all yourself. They are hugely time consuming and won't make good cash for a long time to come.

It's catch 22 with forums, people will post if other people are posting. No one joins forums when there is not an active community.

I launched mine with a little deception to encourage people to sign up. I initially infated the "members" stats, upped the session time so users appeared "logged in" for much much longer and spent ages replying to virtually every single post etc to get some discussion going.

Good luck! Forums are hard work, I'm glad I'm just a sleeping partner now with the forum and don't have to touch it!

I've created my own forums in the passed and have been mods on others, I was thinking of creating a few fake members just so that the post number is anything but zero. Right now its a flat file database forum because my mysql database wasn't working, but hopefully I will change that soon.

I've heard that if you spam your link around too much, and then when your site gets big enough to get a review that it will get a bad review because of the spamming. I posted my link in the comment section on a few relevant youtube videos and I also answered a yahoo question and put my site as the source for the info.

anyone have tips?

edit:also does having a top level domain change anything?
edit2:Just tried to view my site and my free webhost temporarily disabled my site because I reached the cpu usage limit of the server. Their paid service is $4.84 a month, I don't know if I want to pay that yet if this site isn't going to be worth it. I do want to make multiple sites to increase my probability of success. But right now I need to cool it with how many hits im getting from hitleap.