There are so many different programs that it's impossible to give you any pointers on that without knowing what your traffic is going to be aiming for. But here's some things to think about.
First off match the free site to the paysite you will be opening. Ratemycameltoe.com won't do much good for you if you open a site that features midget fucking.
Second, if you are going to go to the trouble of getting traffic and building a following for a site then FORGET redirecting to your paysite. Never, ever throw away traffic. Always keep your domains. If you have a few thousand unique hits a day then keep them! If you redirected you would get that few thousand hits the first couple days and then zero. Search engine traffic is gone because redirected domains get removed from listings. Except for the very few signups you would get (surfers HATE redirection) that traffic would be gone forever. But if you leave the site in place and just advertise the paysite prominently you can get a guaranteed flow of traffic basically forever. The only time it really makes sense to redirect a domain is when you have different spelling variations so that you don't lose any type in traffic.
Third, go easy on buying content and stuff. You have to watch expenses to make sure you don't actually lose money on a free site.
Fourth, interactive "rate me" sites might be a dangerous type of thing to start right at the moment. If you are accepting other people's photographs and hosting them on your site 2257 compliance goes right out the window. It's not the same as running a tgp site because tgps usually only provide links to other sites. They don't provide content. Plus there are concerns about copyright issues and even ch**d Po*n violations.
And if you actually do start some sort of interactive site then buying content won't help you much. I don't know of anyplace where you can buy 1 picture each of 100 girls.
Hybrid Mode
