How do I advertise my website?

[David]

I have a website coming up and I would like to get the word out. Are there any good websites besides facebook, myspace or twitter that I could use to advertise the site before its release?

Also, I already created a preview and uploaded it to youtube.

[Jake]

Unless you are going to have a grand opening with a substantial part of the site already in place, advance advertising may not be so effective, people want immediate gratification and should be able to click and see the site they are reading about. Creating links to a non existing address is not a good practice, and under construction pages might be a search rank negative.

When the site is in place, the same links that help it's search ranking will also bring in direct traffic, there are the web site directories of questionable value for which you can find services who can submit your site to a hundreds of directories for a few dollars.
Social bookmarking sites are another low level link source that can be automated to a degree, SocialAdr.com is a service that helps you do sort of bookmark swaps so your bookmark ends up on multiple accounts in 13 or so sites like Digg, there's a paid option getting you maybe 800 bookmarks a month for $20 without you having to do bookmarking for others, you provide a "spinnable" description that gets re-written for each poster.

Google seems to give a lot of weight to their Facebook counterpart Google+ it's worth having a presence there just for the search ranking benefits.

Some businesses wanting to collect Facebook links or other signups will hold a sweepstake which they promote with paid Facebook ads, such giveaways can get very high click rates when they link to a Facebook page, resulting in click cost of less than a dime in some cases, if you have the sort of product association that makes sense in a giveaway, this might be a nice way to kick things off. Marketers are always worried about conversion testing, getting a boost in the initial traffic can help get site performance stats sooner.