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Ask HN: Do you know of other good HN-like places to post your articles?
32 points by swombat on Feb 23, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 18 comments
As a blogger, I regularly post things on HN if I feel that they will be interesting to the community here. I also often post things into the appropriate subreddit. I tend to ignore digg, and submit some things to Slashdot.

Ultimately, that works very well for technology-related articles, because all those communities are technology-minded. So, for example, when writing blog articles on Woobius Scribbles (my company's blog), if they're relevant, I'll post them here.

However, the market for Woobius is architects and the construction industry. That's a very different niche from HN. And yet, there are quite a few people linked to the construction industry on this site, as witnessed by the comments on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=479749 .

So, my open questions to HN users who have blogs (or read blogs) in niches other than this one are:

Where do you go to find those non-technology blogs?

Where do you go to promote your blog(s)/businesses in non-technology niches?

What are the other "niche HN's" out there?

Thanks!




Where do you go to find those non-technology blogs?

Google for keywords of interest to you, talk to people in your market, talk to your customers, etc.

Where do you go to promote your blog(s)/businesses in non-technology niches?

The succinct answer: You use it to promote other people.

The longer one: blogging other people's stuff and commenting on their blogs gives you a relationship with them. Once you have a relationship with them, and they trust you, it isn't "promoting your stuff" so much as it is sharing something that they think their readers will enjoy.

Additionally, after you have a loyal fanbase, you will probably find that your most successful "promotion" efforts are a result of pulling rather than pushing. i.e. a portion of your readers who are more dedicated and savvier will take it upon themselves to spread your stuff elsewhere.

[Edit: I don't make any money off the following recommendation, and only am mentioning it because its exactly responsive to your query: I wrote a chapter in a book called BlogBlazers about this. Its the above two paragraphs at chapter length, essentially. Aaron Wall's chapter is good, too.]


You know, I agree with you, but I've found, from personal experience in the technology-related sphere, that a little bit of help along the way makes the whole process quicker. Submitting your articles to relevant forums makes it more likely that you'll pick up a community of readers, commenters and subscribers.

My problem is, I only know the communities that I belong to - and they're all mostly technology-related, like HN or proggit.


I concur. I've been keenly searching for sites in HN's vein, but centered around philosophy and the arts. 'HN's vein' is vague, I'll elaborate:

1. Keen eyed moderators, stamping down on vandalism; including, bad grammar, and bad spelling.

2. A intelligent community of readers dedicated to adding comments of value: carefully constructed, sourced, input.

3. Clean, content-oriented design.

(I might have to put my dailymis.com ___domain to use)


If you know of any half-way decent sites, pass them on, email if you prefer. My SO is an artist and would like a good forum.


Russell,

No respectable forums to my knowledge; however, I do suggest 'Arts & Letters Daily' (http://www.aldaily.com/). I expect you frequent A&L, a bulletin of the day's most prominent cultural articles; on the off-chance there are those still unaware I do, gladly, bring it to your attention.


You might check out http://www.newmogul.com/ for business news...


Thanks. I should have mentioned, I know about NewMogul and undrln ( http://www.undrln.com/ - a more design-themed social news site).

Any others? I have a bias towards sites that architects and other construction folks would find of interest, but even other ones are interesting, since I do write on a variety of topics.


wow this site looks and functions exactly like HN


It's built using the same Arc-based system.


Which system is that?



Check out Slinkset (YC Summer 08) - lots of niche sites that are not about technology:

http://discover.slinkset.com/

(I started my own HN-like site for public corruption, using Slinkset: http://publicdime.slinkset.com/)

Also outside of technology, I read Universal Hub (universalhub.com) to get a handle on Boston-based blogs, but it doesn't have a voting system like HN.

In the tech sphere, I sometimes look at this one, focused on FOSS:

Free Software Daily -- fsdaily.com


If you want Chicago-related news/announcements/weirdness my site, The Windy Citizen is (finally) starting to take off. http://www.windycitizen.com

There's not much tech on there yet, but there could be if local guys shared their stuff on there.

As far as I know we're the only local, social news site out there. Kevin Rose himself told me it was a lousy idea. I'm intent on proving him wrong.


how about off-line ? or google adwords ?

Direct mail might make sense, or flyers at builders trade shows, I know that sounds 'weird' for an online business but it would seem to me that your potential customers are all much too busy to be hanging around on forums.


I am way out of date on this, but vertical specific magazines are hungry for stories. If it is reasonably well written and topical, you are pretty much guaranteed to be published. The only downside is that you should wait until it's published before putting it online. If you have a friend in PR, check to see if this is still true or give one of the mags a call and pitch your idea.


I run a site called http://www.gibsonandlily.com

all the people that post there are nerds, but it is mostly non-tech news...we kindof joke that we're like reddit and digg...but for adults.


I dont know of one, maybe this is a good idea to make one? or start a subreddit


"Making" a community is not really a technological problem... There is, for example, an "architecture" reddit, but it is half dead and appears to be populated by a handful of architecture fans, rather than by actual architects.

Creating such a community would definitely be a lot of work, with a very small chance of payoff.




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