Easiest coverage to get is in your local paper. That's a start. Remember, all you need is ONE small break. For us, ONE line of Mashable mention at launch got us on Digg, TechCrunch and hundreds of other blogs. But then again, chances are against you that the same will happen to your site or to my next site so having a parallel marketing plan is always a good idea.
Get a screencast and post it on demomyapp.com ;) thats why we built it...
I never spent money for my sites. Word of mouth, google, craigslist (in case of english content) and patience, this is my approach.
This is my first startup, so I don't know what I'm doing, but what has been successful for me before in my career is to try lots of things at once and see what works. I'm trying word of mouth, viral marketing, PR, google adwords, stumbleupon, and online ads on targeted sites. Of course, it would help if you visited us also at Wisdomology.com.
By spamming the URL here, of course.
You can do your own PR. Try a local newspaper press release.
Write up your startup as a human interest story and send it to every local newspaper in America. See how many times you get published.
"likebetter helps single mother plan her success...Today, a single mother was given a second chance. A second chance to rise up the corporate ladder. All thanks to likebetter. Betty, 32, was 23 when she had her child, 'I thought it was a blessing, but it was a curse. I couldn't get hired anywhere!' So Betty went to work as a coffee barista to make ends meet. She did this till last year when she discovered likebetter.com, 'it was so simple yet so addictive.'"
Etc. :D
You got it!
When my site has substantial word-of-mouth momentum, then I'll try to accelerate it with other forms of marketing. But it might turn out that word of mouth is the only thing that works.
But how do you build that initial Word-Of-Mouth Momentum? Can't be easy to do.
Use it yourself. Get people you know to use it. Make it better until they start talking to their friends about it. (My project is not a social networking site.)
are people just hoping that they'll get promoted through word of mouth? or will you be spending money on marketing?
add good content to my site, hire some hot model, or overweight wwf wrestler to get a tatoo that says http://www.JobSearchMaps.com
develop an online sitcom set at my company that will 1) popularize my company's online markets, 2) showcase market participants, and 3) earn profits from sales of ad space (in the tradition of diggnation, NBC's The Apprentice, etc.)