Update, January 10, 2008: 9 more sites have been added.
Update, November 13, 2007: 5 more sites join the club.
Update, October 17, 2007: I’ve cleaned up the list a bit… I removed Newsheat (now just someone’s blog), AdvertLover (down for now), JudysBook (no longer a social media site), PickStation (down for now), and VideoBomb (now a porn site).
Update, August 22, 2007: I’ve added 4 new sites to the list.
Update, May 27, 2007: I’ve added 8 new sites to the list.
With Digg getting more and more hostile–and with my baiting habit getting a bit out-of-control–I’ve lately been forced to look elsewhere to get my beloved jolts of social media traffic.
No matter. Evolve or die! They won’t send you 5,000 uniques in an hour, but the traffic they do send is more likely to subscribe to your RSS feed, because their members have already identified themselves as part of your niche’s tribe. (And it’s a more targeted tribe than the “gamer wanker” at Digg, or “Politico smartass” at Reddit.)
Without further adieu, here are 17 25 29 24 29 38 niche social media sites that actually seem to be gaining critical mass:
- AgentB (Deals)
- ArmchairGM (Sports)
- AutoSpies (Autos)
- Babblz (Parenting)
- Ballhype (Sports)
- blogs4God (Christian)
- BuzzFlash (News)
- Care2 (Social Action)
- Daytipper (Tips & Tutorials)
- Dealigg (Deals)
- Design Float (Design)
- Dissect Medicine (Health & Medicine)
- DNHour (Domaining)
- DZone (Developers)
- Game Diggity (Game Videos)
- Hacker News (Web Development)
- Hugg (Environment)
- iliketotallyloveit.com (Shopping)
- IndianPad (India News)
- KillerStartups (Startup Reviews)
- Meme or Lame (Gadgets)
- Mixx (Anything)
- PhotographyVoter (Photography)
- Pixel Groovy (Web Design)
- Plant Change (Environment)
- PlugIM (Online Marketing)
- qoolsqool (Education Resources)
- ScoreGuru (Sports)
- ShowHype (Entertainment)
- Sk-rt (Lifestyle)
- Small Business Brief (Business & Entrepreneurship)
- Sphinn (Search Engines & Online Marketing)
- Stylehive (Fashion)
- tipstrs (Tips & Tutorials)
- TTiqq (Tips & Tutorials)
- Tweako (Computers & Technology)
- Value Investing News (Investing)
- VideoSift (Videos)
It’s a good bet that nearly every linkbait you publish would fit in at at least one of the above sites, so I recommend making ‘niche social media submission’ part of your regular launch to-do list. Just like ol’ fashioned link begging, it’s a great tactic to hedge against the power of the Bury Brigade at Digg. (Save yourself time: Go sign up and get an identical username and password for each site, and then bookmark this page 
)
I expect that in a year from now there will be a few hundred niche social media sites with a critical mass of users. Let’s hope so, baiting Digg ain’t good for the old ticker 
p.s. a message to all you muppets rolling your eyes and saying “great now the SEOs can spam the niche sites, too!”: an SEO submitting to (even spamming!) your social media site is a good sign. Just figure out how to make the community self policing and work through the growing pains.
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18 comments ↓
Some decent sites, I’ve started submitting articles to a few of them. Yesterday I got to the front page of dissect media. I’m waiting to see if any links are forth coming, but I rather doubt it. I’ve been on the front page for about 12 hours and gotten 5 total visitors. Can you say which ones actually drove some links to you?
> I’ve been on the front page for about 12 hours and gotten 5 total visitors.
> Can you say which ones actually drove some links to you?
It can certainly be a grind–95% of football is blocking and tackling
I like Hugg and JudysBook a lot.
Know of any good social media sites for travel and rec?
oh ya and try allthingsweb2 as well.
The rss feed for dissect medicine is here:
http://www.dissectmedicine.com/_rss1_0.xml
I linked to it because it’s not anywhere on the main page.
I tried posting this comment in your new post however it keeps telling me to login.. which directs me to a profile updating page.
Anyhow since I posted one article on dissect media which got 4 total votes (3 by me..) I have received 35 visitors. I haven’t gotten around to trying many of the other ones but I’m planning to soon.
By the way Andy (and hopefully you don’t regard this as spam) I thought you might be interested in a post I did the other day about nice places to retire http://www.international-medical-insurance.com/news/?p=18
I would add one more niche to the list, http://Activerain.com. For the real estate industry, it has grown quite large and does send traffic.
Here’s one for Internet Marketing: PlugIM. Not sure if it has gained critical mass, but is highly targetted and has a decent Alexa score.
I think it’s fun to observe hundreds of people from Stubmleupon or Digg hitting your site…
But. Recently I had 160 hits from Stubmleupon and NONE of them signed up for our live help service.
So, personally, I think that 10 visitors from a niche social bookmarking site (above) that sign up are still better than 1,000 from Digg or Stumbleupon that just come by and go.
A new social content site for the list:
http://www.DailyHub.com (content for Business Geeks)
Alexa ranking is decent (and rising). For those writing business-oriented content, it’s a pretty good way to get some new readers.
http://www.seotagg.com is a pretty new one but it has sent me 66 visitors in the last two weeks.
http://www.travelnewsdot.comis for travel news and media. One of your users asked for one, and here it is!
LGBT scene has a news, social site: http://www.gaygregator.com
It’s just getting off the ground, tho…
Here’s a google query for real estate related web 2.0 sites:
http://www.google.com/search?q=activerain+zoomf+OR+ratings+OR+citycribs+OR+hotpads+OR+iiproperty+OR+realzedge+OR+trulia+OR+vivirama&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
zillow is another one in that niche.
Googling for certain sites with OR statements, if they are small sites, or just combined usually turns up nice lists of related sites, besides google’s related operator, eg “similar sites”
Here’s an example, googling for ‘agentb dealigg‘ turns up dealplumber, dealsplus, dealcomet. You’ll need to test yourself if you can get traffic, though.
SiN2.0, or Sex Information Network, is one for adult topics, not necessarily gregarious offensive porn but adult topics none the less. You could go as far as calling it the Digg dedicated to the NSFW side of things.
I have long bookmarked this site. But now that I am working on a social media site I thought it might be apropos for this list. Its an entertainment aggregator.
The URL is http://www.heynielsen.com
If anyone is into VoIP, I have a site Pligg site at http://www.voipigg.com/
(apologies for the potential dupe, however when I submitted this the last time my browser went back to the 5 new sites story…odd)
This niche list is great for targeted traffic.
Another one for the niche list… http://www. Lucrativ.es - An exclusive Internet Marketing pligg based site
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