I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating. Growing the bitcoin economy is very simple. Dedicate a portion of your earnings to buying bitcoin every week (however small that may be doesn't matter). And never sell bitcoins on an exchange if you can possibly help it. Instead, use those bitcoins to buy stuff (or pay people). I think if everyone tried to do this, it would be the most effect way to grow bitcoin usage. Trying to explicitly market bitcoin to people that may not know or care about it can backfire (but countering anti-bitcoin propaganda is important).
Totally agreed, but right now the places you can buy stuff with BTC is extremely limited. So this cannot happen without the community really focusing on priority #1 above. Once the sites are created the trade throughput will automatically follow.
Personally, I'm sitting on a lot of stock that I want to sell for Bitcoins, but there's no site I can sell it on apart from black markets which also sell drugs, and want to charge me 15BTC to become a seller.
I don't have the expertise needed to create a free-to-join ebay style site of my own, so I'm stuck.I'm sure I'm not alone. The community as a whole has masses of stuff (especially miners getting out of the game selling graphics cards) that they want to sell but nowhere to do it.
I'm really impressed with your Bitpay site BTW, tools like yours will make it so much easier for merchants and auction sites to exist!