Beagle - 1:29 am on Oct 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

It depends on your audience. "Bait" needs to be something that's not so important that a lack of access would keep guests away, but important enough to be an incentive. I have a forum with blogging and image gallery built in. Guests can't post on the forum or have a blog, but they can view everything except the image gallery. In my niche, a free ebook wouldn't make someone sign up, but access to the image gallery just might. All the better if you can have a custom error page telling them why they can't access it.