While you can read tons of articles on how to create and run a corporation, it's extremely hard to create one from scratch. When creating a corporation with just yourself as the only corp member, there is a lot ahead to make sure that it grows into a self-thriving corporation. Unlike other MMOs, in EVE Online it's a lot harder to make sure to get a good group of people. In this article I'm not going to go over how to actually do various corporation roles, more than I will tell you about various experiences that will hurt or help your new corporation.
After creating your corporation it's best to have someone provide the service to set the limits of corporation members. There are many players that offer such a service to allow your corporation to have more than the small amount you can make with the minimum requirements to create the corp.
Choose Your Corp's Role
When making a new corporation, it's best to decide what you want your corporation to specialize in. This is where you decide if you want to run a PvP corp, a Mining Corp, a Mission Running corp, a Exploration Corp, and so forth, and so on. Not only that, you want to decide where you are based out of, high-sec, low-sec, null-sec, or w-space. This is extremely important. While many corporations may think allowing many different types of players in is a good idea, it IS NOT. If you allow a large diversity of players in, you will have a hard time making corp decisions later on. Causing such a conflict early on will cause various players to leave when the corp makes a large decision; this is something you want to avoid or at least minimize your losses.
The best thing I've found is claiming to be a certain corporation (PvP corp), but allow the players to have alts that did other things. Doing this tells each player you are a "PvP corp", but that doing other things are "Ok", but the corporation will grow towards better PvP oriented goals. This way no one can complain when you decide to move to a wormhole, or move to low-sec. It's best to reduce the amount of confrontation from the start.
Advertise
After you have your corporation prepared to take on thousands of members, it's time to start collecting those members. To do so it's best to advertise. You can advertise with the in-game Corporation Ads, but this doesn't prove to be the best method. The best thing is to interact with the player directly, using local, corporation recruitment channels, and even the corp channel with an alt in an NPC corp. These are the best ways to get people that are looking to find a corp specific to their needs. In doing so, make sure your advertisement is clean, with links, and with correct spelling (I've seen many corps get trolled in corp recruit for poor spelling). As your corporation starts to grow, add various events, noob services, corp roles, and anything else that could possibly grab the attention of an undecided player.
Entertainment
This is the number one issue in any corp starting out. You have to look at EVE corps completely different from other MMO's guilds, and clans. While other games are fairly "static", and players are just wanting people to group with to do one thing, EVE players want a corporation that actually "entertains" them as they continue to play. Such things like group missions, group roams, noob help, and anything else they can do each day is what a lot are looking for.
Lotteries are one of the best ways to offer cheap ships, and boost corporation activity. Setting up a lottery where members pay a set price, and have to be on a certain time to claim the prize makes for a great time to get members together, and run groups afterwards. This is one things I don't see enough corps do, but I see large alliances do constantly. Usually a new corporation will wait to see how many people sign up before announcing the ship, but any time the total count covers the cost, and then some. Usually the extra goes towards the corporation, helping with various corp bills.
There are many ways to entertain your corp members, but always remember if you aren't there, they won't stay long. If you feel you are going to be gone for awhile, make sure that you have a trusted corp mate to take over until then. I cannot count the number of times CEOs disappeared, or went on break, only to come back to a corp with 20% less members. If you don't entertain them, they will find someone that will.
Corp Roles
Like I mentioned with entertainment, it's good to have other people that are willing to help entertain members other than yourself. While this may seem easy enough, it's also easy to go on a "promotion spree". After promoting someone to help with the corporation, make sure to use it as an example to other members as to how they can be promoted. Such things as helping other members, helping with corp events, and arranging events are great reasons to promote that first person. Players that constantly set a bad example, stray off to group with other corporations, and generally ignore their corp is usually not someone you want to promote. NEVER PROMOTE A PLAYER INTO POWER TO GET THEM TO STAY. There are many players that will act like children if they don't get what they want (corp roles), and it's best to just let them go away.
Since we are in EVE Online, you may want to restrict their corp roles to disallow taking corporation assets, and corp money until you know they can be completely trusted. The reason being is there are lots of corporation thieves in EVE, and a huge loss can always kill corporation morale. Another thing to mention is to not promote everyone that fits the bill right away, and to make sure there are at least 25 members for every "entertainer". If you promote too many people, you'll end up with a scenario that fits the metaphor "too many chiefs, not enough Indians", something that I've seen too many times, and you just end up with a bunch of ranked member fighting among themselves, and doing nothing.
As your corporation grows into alliance territory, it's great to start giving specific roles to different players just to give them a feeling of self worth. Not only does this help you from having to deal with everything, it keeps various higher ranked members from doing the same things, and organizing your corporation. Basically taking a lot of the heat off you, so you can focus on the development on the corp, while your command makes sure it continues to run smoothly.
There are many other scenarios, but I think you get the general idea. Promote people that help the corp, try to entertain as many as possible in corp, and do not treat any disgruntled players better than others. Favoritism is another killer.
One little trick with the roles is to setup titles. This gives each member a feeling of importance when they have a title that everyone can see. These titles don't need to have any sort of roles, but simply a name that makes a member feel like they accomplished something when earning the titles. By using this method you make the member feel special, and feel the need to do more now that they have this new shiny title. Also, make sure not to give these titles away like they are nothing. Maybe give one to one member in a week, and have an in-game ceremony. You want to make sure your members feel special, and show other members there is something to work towards. You can use these titles for your "problem members". Sometimes these types of members are simply causing issues due to feeling left out, or simply not comfortable with the corp yet. This is a great way to turn that around, or at least give them a positive spotlight for once.
Corp Assets
As your corporation grows you may find that you want to offer better services than you do already. PvP corps thrive immensely when they have some sort of "Ship Replacement Fund", allowing players to get some money back when they lose a ship in a "corp roam". Not only does it help people afford the ships you fly, you can also use it to force members to fly a specific ship in your roams (if it's not listed in the appropriate ship list, you will not get paid). Either way, generating the ISK to offer such a service requires a large income from the corporation.
If you are a mission running or incursion corp, this may be a fairly simple task, but if you're not you may have to find another way to generate non-stop ISK. Many smaller to mid-sized corporations will harvest moon materials from low-sec where the profit is solely for the corporation. Another option is weekly wormhole runs, where corp groups get together to clear an entire wormhole system to gather everything they can. Another is to set the corporation tax to 100%, and have everyone run missions for an hour. This is a great time to run that lottery we talked about, because no one is going to want to be on otherwise. There are a lot of options with the point is to generate income, while showing member support.
Decorations
While giving your members roles or titles gives them a sense of importance, decorations give members something that separates them from the rest. Giving out medals is nothing like giving out titles, as you want to save decorations for some act that merits being shown to everyone. Such things as taking out lots of enemies during a war, saving other members from gankers, or anything that doesn't happen everyday. If someone in your corp does something that most of your members can't stop talking about, you've probably found something to make a medal for.
One of the null-sec corporations I've been with had a great medal system. Basically if you killed so many people in the month, flew logistics ships in so many fleets, lost a certain amount of ships in fleets, you gained a medal. This gave all of the corp members something to strive for, while motivating people to join fleets. I bring this up, because it is by far one of the best uses I've seen for decorations.
Summary
I know this may seem like elementary aspects, but you might be surprised how many times you see these issues in almost every corporation. By following this advice your corporation should have no issues getting off the ground, and continuing to grow.
Enjoy, and recruit safe. o/
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