Tips on building buzz and getting traffic for new sites

[NormanNewsome]

I have an idea for a new "socia"l website. No its not a facebook or anything like that, but I feel it fills a void in a particular niche. The problem I am having is figuring out a marketing plan to get people to sign up. When you're starting a new social website like this its kind of important for it too feel popular and you need users to make it feel popular and useful. Which kind of gets you into a chicken or the egg type scenario. There are a few keywords I intend on doing SEO for, but I don't think pure SEO will make this community popular.

Some ideas I have:

• Creative "tell a friend" strategy that builds incentive to get friends signed up like win an ipad or something like that. I also want to make it easy to tell friends, so you can import contacts from facebook, twitter, and email contacts rather than typing in all those emails by hand.
• Targeting a few blogs related to this niche hoping that they will interview me about the website.
• Advertising on forums and blogs related to my niche.
• Making the site simple, visually appealing and intuitive so users can dive right in without thinking.
• Making a good enough product to where the site can get buzz on active subreddits and hackernews.

I'm a software engineer by nature, so marketing isn't a strong suite of mine, but I'm no rookie to building popular websites either (just been a while). I'd like to get some ideas from the seomoz community on this. Thanks.

[AlanBleiweiss]

The best suggestion I can offer beyond your initial thoughts (all strong by the way) is to start in "Beta" mode (or maybe even "Alpha" mode), and make it clear that this is the case so people know it's very early in the life-cycle and thus will have much lower expectations regarding user / usage volume.

And definitely find a way to partner with someone who has very strong marketing skills.  Without high quality marketing from someone who's "been there/done that", and you could very well be setting yourself up for a big fail.  There's no guarantee they'll help you succeed, or that early adopters will catch the buzz wave, however it's more likely they will.