You have a cool new idea on a revolutionary new internet site (e.g. one that makes ebay look obsolete or something that might make you surpass google). However how would you start to make it known in the net as the best idea is worthless as long as nobody knows it and uses it.
What's your recommendation? Online Ads? Spaming blogs? But it should not be evil. Not everybody has a reputation like Joel to start up a new site and immediately get hundreds of users.
Pass it along to everyone you know if it is good they will tell their friends and so on and so forth until the whole world knows.
Spreading the word by using viral marketing is probably the cheapest option. Of course you could opt for a classical marketing campagne. I think that is not what you are after though? Private Betas, invite a friend and features which will make the site desirable for a face-to-face or email to email recommendation are a good way to get noticed. Apart from that youc an only hope for the slashdot, digg and stumbleupon effect,
Get out in the community. Facebook. MySpace. LinkedIn. Whatever it takes. Hit the blogs. Find the discussions that matter to your new site. Find the people who want it. This is the people side of programming. (Hopefully you didn't write something that nobody wants.)
Next, you've got to write good stuff. Make people want more - but in a good way.
If you really want to read about hitting the digital pavement and getting your work known, check out Gary Vaynerchuk. That guy really gets at you to go out and do what you want to do.
I agree with Unkwntech. You hinted at the solution yourself -- develop a reputation like Joel has. By the time you do that, you'll have discarded bunches of ideas for various reasons. If you hit a good idea, it'll spread. Find the people it'd help or appeal to and enlist their help.
On the other hand, if you want to keep it All To Yourself, your chances of success are really, really slim.
How to Launch by Aaron Swartz is the single best article I've ever read about this. To quote:
I'll call this technique the Gmail Launch, since it's based on what Gmail did. Gmail is probably one of the biggest Web 2.0 success stories, so there's an argument in its favor right there. Here's how it works:
Have users from day one. Obviously at the very beginning it'll just be yourself and your co-workers, but as soon as you have something that you don't cringe while using, you give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback and once you have something that's tolerable, let them invite their friends to use it too.
Try to get lots of feedback from these new invitees, figuring out what doesn't make sense, what needs to be fixed, and what things don't work on their bizarre use case combination. Once these are all straightened out, and they're using it happily, you let them invite their friends. Repeat until things get big enough that you need to...
Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. By requiring codes, you protect against a premature slashdotting and force your users to think carefully about who actually would want to use it (getting them to do your marketing for you). Plus, you make everyone feel special for using your product. (You can also start (slowly!) sending invite codes to any email lists you might have.)
Iterate: give out invite codes, fix bugs, make sure things are stable. Stay in this phase until the number of users you're willing to invite is about the same as the number you expect will initially sign up if you make the site public. For Gmail, this was a long time, since a lot of people wanted invites. You can probably safely do it sooner.
Take off the invite code requirement, so that people can use the product just by visiting its front page. Soon enough, random people will come across it from Google or various blogs and become real users.
If all this works -- if random people are actually happy with your product and you're ready to grow even larger -- then you can start building buzz and getting press and blog attention. The best way to do this is to have some kind of news hook -- some gimmick or controversial thing that everyone will want to talk about. (With reddit, the big thing was that we switched from Lisp to Python, which was discussed endlessly in the Lisp and Python communities and gave us our first big userbase.)
Start marketing. Once you start using up all the growth you can get my word-of-mouth (and this can take a while -- Google is only getting to this stage now), you can start doing advertising and other marketing-type things to provide the next big boost in growth.
I've worked with certain people who have informed me that incoming links are probably the best way to get yourself atop the search engine results. It makes sense, really, the more popular you are the higher your ranking. However, I have seen/heard that the more popular the sites are that link you, the better that improvement is. Just food for thought, and could be completely useless after the next Google dance.
Blog comments, trackbacks, technorati links, etc are quick and easy ways to get some traffic. Just don't spam your link without a darn good reason or you're likely to garner some hatred across the tubes.
If you're selling a product, however, I've heard good things about Google Ad Words as well as Yahoo's ad network. I used to work at a place who worked on/hosted a shoe store and all of their advertising was done through ad words and word of mouth, and they pushed $300k in orders in a single day.
Really though, you have to target the audience with the marketing. That's the key.
Start a podcast that features Jeff and Joel discussing the site for a few months before it's launched.
What's the common element amongst its intended users? I recently launched a new site that was primarily driven by local region, and an ad in the local paper for a couple of weeks did a good job of boot-strapping me.
Whatever you do, make sure you don't short-change the site itself! It's got to continue to be interesting and lively enough that people will return not just a second, but a third time.
Not everybody has a reputation like Joel to start up a new site and immediately get hundreds of users.
But do you really want hundreds of users on day one? What if you get Slashdotted, Dugg, and Stumbleupon-ed (what's the verb form of 'Stumbleupon'?) on the first day you go live, and your database server goes down. Now all those people think you have stability problems and probably won't come back. Your site will have effectively blown up on the launch pad.
Or, you could do this the way Gmail launched. Limit your users with invite codes, and rely on word-of-mouth and the appeal of being part of the insider crowd to grow your userbase slowly enough that you can upgrade your infrastructure to keep up.
All of this was said a lot better by Aaron Swartz.
Think of a lame name, loudly brag that you're the best, then flop miserably in your debut.
Everyone will know about your new site then.
Seriously though, here's another article with some suggestions.
I would suggest to try to get a positive coverage in super tech blogs like Techcrunch(for that you should have a real cool app) and it will eventually list you in top aggregators like Techmeme. Hit tech conferences and that will certainly be covered in major blogs and you probably will have enough visitors now to leverage on them and spread it as a word of mouth. emulate twitter can also be my suggestion.
Make a plan - written plan - for spreading the word and openly ask for feedback from people. Don't spam sites that don't allow self promotion. Build expectation before you launch but be careful to avoid disappointed users if your site doesn't raise to the expectations.
But ofcourse, depends on whether you need a GMail launch or a Hollywood launch.
Also listen to last 3 stackoverflow podcasts to learn more.
Digg it....and then watch your servers explode under the pressure.