I’ve slowly been developing launch tactics for BeerChief. Although it’s a joint venture, Adam and myself have seperate roles in that i look after the marketing/promotion/business side of things and he takes care of the actual site itself design/coding/server stuff etc..
Obviously we’ll help each other out where possible, but it’s important to give ourselves positions we’re both good at and have some sort of experience with. This reduces the need to outsource work and means we have more control over what we’re doing.
I’ve got some great promotional ideas once we get a community together and have thousands of members.. but to draw in the initial members is the challenging part, made even more diffcult by the fact we’ll have very little cash in hand to play around with.
Remember, we’re not backed by venture capitalists or any outside sources. We’ve already spent over $500 on design and any more cash provided is from our own pockets; which aren’t that deep 
But i reckon this is a good thing as it forces us to think and spend our cash wisely. Plus, we’ve no interference from anyone and we can do things our way and take our time.
Here’s a few different techniques we’ll be using..
- Press Release
- PayPerPost
- ReviewMe
- StumbleUpon
- Digg
- Delicious
- Bebo
- MySpace
- Webmaster Forums
- Sending ~500 texts out to friends
- Living in our BeerChief t-shirts for a month
That will be the initial groundwork. We’ll be doing very little advertising after that as the community should then be able to support and grow itself. I also believe if a site is good enough, the owner’s shouldn’t have to sell it to people, people will buy in to it themselves and use it and tell their friends etc..
So viral marketing will make or break BeerChief and we’re confident enough in the site to place our trust in viral marketing. Every site needs to be advertised in order to get the ball rolling, but once the first wave of people know about it, then if it’s any sort of a decent site, they will refer the second wave naturally. If you have to pay constantly to get traffic, you know there is something seriously wrong.
Spamming people is something we want to avoid also so when i mentioned bebo/myspace i meant we’ll be settting up profiles and private messaging our friends.. i don’t mean buying bulletins to send out to 100,000 random people 
We’ll also be encouraging web 2.0 related bloggers/webmasters to check out the site and give us a plug if they think the site is worthy of one. All of these techniques should put us on the map and generate a bit of hype and attention for us. Most of them are free and cost nothing, but in total, we’ll be spending around $250. Possibly more if i sell JPEGr or we’re feeling generous