I've often seen a lot of post asking how to form a new guild and I've had some experience in this area so I thought I'd put together some useful advice. Obviously there's no single route to take and forming a good guild is as much about finding good members as it is following certain rules and ideas.

Forming a new guild
For a lot of new guilds the first step is the hardest. Most servers have plenty of established guilds that can offer better rewards to new members then a new guild, and anyone who isn't in a guild are generally a loner or so terrible no-one wants to touch them.

This obviously limits your options for recruits, and standing in your factions capital spamming for new members for your raiding guild will not attract the best possible members you could find.

The best solution to this problem is to start making friends with people before thinking about forming a guild. As a guild leader you need to be able to impress people with your skill and dedication, and the best way to do this and to scope out possible new members is to quest or run instances with strangers. Try to find unguilded people and make an effort to impress them, get them friended, and start getting a group of people you spend a lot of quality time with.

Ideally you'll soon find yourself with a group of friends who all get along with each other and all would like to start raiding at some point. You'd also hopefully have enough friends to make up at least one 5 man group fairly regularly. At this point you should be ready to form your guild.

You should now have enough members to run 5 man instances most nights, and if you are lucky you might even have enough to start running Karazhan. Before you move forwards though you need to be prepared for various aspects of the game.

Instance Progression
Assuming you are aiming to progress through level 70 instances you currently have to increase the size of your raiding group. The first raiding instance is Karazhan, a 10 man instance, which is then followed by 25 man raids. This means you will have to build your guild up from having enough members to do a 10 man instance to a 25 man instance which can cause problems.

The first mistake a lot of guilds makes is recruiting members for 25 man instances but still only running one Karazhan raid a week, leaving the majority of members out in the cold, which generally leads to a lot of annoyance.

One way to avoid this is to first build your guild up to enough members for one Karazhan raid, then recruit to have enough members for two Karazhan raids. What's worked well in my guild is having two groups for Karazhan which have a set pool of members to draw from, balanced equally. Some guilds prefer to have one group full of their best members, while the other group struggles along, but in my opinion this will only cripple the guild when you move onto 25 man raids.

Once you've got two Karazhan raids set up it's not far to go to recruit the remaining members to have enough for 25 man raids. By that time you'll probably have some members who have everything they want from at least the earlier bosses so the new members can go for the earlier bosses, while the older members can spend time working on the later bosses.

Planning ahead
One thing that will help out your new raiding guild a lot is planning ahead with regards to attunements and resist gear. One problem my guild had when it was starting raiding was that we'd reach point where we couldn't progression because either people weren't attuned, or we lacked the required resist guild. Attunement plays an even bigger part in BC, so for any raiding guild I would suggest the following to reduce the amount of time waiting for people to catch up:
- Begin with getting everyone attuned to Karazhan, the first thing people should do when hitting 70 is picking up the attunement quest from outside of Karazhan.
- Once everyone is attuned start working on getting revered with The Sha'Tar, Lower City, Cenarion Expedition, and Thrallmar/Honor Hold. Cenarion Expedition rep should be your main priority.
- At the same time get your guild members to do the prequests for attunement to the Eye, which should lead you to the point where you have 3 Heroic quests.
- Once members are revered with CE they should enter The Steam Vaults and pick up the attunement quest for Serpentshire Cavern.
- Get to the point where everyone can kill Nightbane and Gruul and complete SSC attunement. Hopefully by this point everyone should be revered with the factions required for the quests the lead to The Eye attunement, so you can work on those while you go through SSC. This is also a good time to get heroic badges for the fire resist gear you can buy with them.

After you are doing SSC and The Eye things are a lot more simpler for attunement, it's really just the early stages where you have a million things to do. It's a good idea to work on getting resist gear together, there's epic frost plate and arcane cloth resist recipes available from Karazhan, and epic nature resist plate recipes from the CE, as well as fire resist gear for all classes available for all classes from heroic badges.

Added to the new compilation sticky about guild and raid management and leadership:
Guides: Guild/Raid Management and Leadership