How do you go about spreading the word about your product or service?
iamelgringo: I started a social news site devoted to cute cat/dog pictures and videos earlier this year.  I worked pretty hard on it for a couple of months, only to realize, that I couldn't stand looking at cute shit every day for months on end.  So, I took the site down.  I got 700 uniques in 3 months, and had 5000 page views.I learned a few things along the way.  I got quite a few initial users off of Mechanical Turk.  I submitted a request asking for users to test my application out.  I paid them a nickel a piece to have users visit my site, click through a couple of links and post a comment on something cute.  I ended up paying around $1 a day, and I got some great feedback from them.  It was also fairly low pressure for me, too.  I didn't have to worry about things breaking and losing users.  The Turkers expected things to break, because I was asking them to test the site out.  I recommend trying spending $5 to 10 on the Turk.  It's really hard to go wrong.I also tried advertising using adwords.  That was a mixed bag.  Initially I got a decend click through rate on my ads because the Westminster Dog show was going on, and people were interested in seeing pictures of cute dogs and cats.  So, I got a bunch of decent traffic from that for around $0.10 to 0.20 a visit.  But, as I continued advertising on adwords, I started noticing a pretty big bounce rate.  So, I cut back on adsense and focused on other channels.I also spent quite a bit of time emailing bloggers who had cute blogs.  I got some traffic from them.I also spent quite a bit of time posting good comments on other people's blogs.  I actually got a couple of clicks a day from people clicking through my signature link on icanhazcheezburger.com.Probably my ROI was from a comment that I posted on a cute pig video on the LA Times website.  I got several good referrals a week for two months off of that single comment.So, I just put up http://newsley.com which is a business/economic social news site.  Right now, I'm just talking to friends and family and getting feedback from them, so I can make changes to the app accordingly.  My next step is going to get some feedback from Mechanical Turk.  It's a cheap and easy way to elicit good feedback from users.This time around, I'm going to work with twitter a lot more.  A friend of mine developed some decent twitter bot software that categorizes twitter users by value to me and handles the following/unfollowing bit while avoiding spamming people.  I think that if you can find twitter users that are interested in your niche, they could probably help out a lot.I don't really know if I'm going to user adwords or not.  It ended up being pretty expensive.  My customer acquisition cost using adwords was about $1-2.I'll still post comments on news stories and articles.  I can sleep at night as long as I'm not spamming the comments thread, and I feel like I'm adding something to the discussion.  Finally, I'm probably going to go out and press the flesh quite a bit more on this one.  I'll probably do a lot more meat space networking for this site.