After you've figured out what the inflation is going to be in your league, and where you sit in the pecking order amongst all the teams in your league, the next step is to determine what you're going to do in your auction.
I do this every year. It isn't enough simply to say to yourself, "I'm going to buy players at value" and expect to succeed. In Stage Three leagues, you're not going to move far enough up the food chain if you're $20 or more behind going in to make enough of an impact this way. Your first decision should be whether or not you should try to compete in all eight categories or whether you should resort to some kind of category optimization and toss one or possibly two categories overboard.
Keep in mind when I say "compete in all eight categories", I mean just that. You're not attempting to buy a 96 or 120 point team out of the gate; such a feat would be next to impossible in a competitive league. What you are trying to do if you're playing an eight category game is build upon the strengths on your freeze list, improve upon the weaknesses enough so that you'll be competitive, and put yourself into a position where you can take advantage of straight trades or FAAB opportunities as they come along.
One thing that should impact your decision to dump a category or not is how strong you believe your dump chips are. What you're looking for are players who will entice second division owners to trade you two or more expensive players who will help your run this year. Emil Brown at $3, for example, is a slightly undervalued freeze, but you're most likely not going to get a rival to trade you Curtis Granderson and Derek Jeter for him come July. Be realistic. Figure out how many of these chips you have versus how many your rivals have. Obviously, you can never take stupid decisions by teams that are dumping into account, so maybe you'll be able to turn Brown into gold. But don't count on it.
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