Link Aggregator Sites for Business

Posted by Irene Perlog

There are many link aggregator sites that can be used effectively for a range of business operations. Sites such as Reddit, Digg and Slashdot can all be used to drum up interest in your blog posts and articles that you have published around the Internet. Keep in mind though that the communities that have grown up in these social networks can be rather close-knit and in almost all cases prefer informative or entertaining content. These communities can be very harsh in standards and personal taste, so they are only recommended for businesses that have a clear mandate to work in a certain industry and can guarantee quality content. Anything that is seen as too proactive about marketing will be downvoted and create bad publicity for your company.

Taming Reddit

Reddit has become in the last few years a very popular website. The site is basically a monolith because it creates a controlled discussion space for people who are interested in or directly involved in an endless range of topics and groups. The most effective way to use Reddit is to identify those key sub communities (or subreddits) that best define your mandate and industry. After you have identified these, you will hire a capable team who will monitor and make use of these communities to gather information, or to provide information that has the potential to bring in new clients.

Make sure that you have an appropriately trained team who is sensitive to the taste issues outlined above and who will never try to advertise or sell anything directly. The key with Reddit is to be transparent and subtle.

Digg and Slashdot

These two aggregator sites are similar to Reddit, but they have both changed a lot in the last five or so years. Digg has become more mainstream and it is hard to break into as there is so much competing content. It is also very general so unless you are already popular, it is unlikely that you will go “viral” there anymore. Slashdot is a lot like Digg, but it is focused more on technology and computing issues and is touted as more of a “geeky” website. As you can imagine it is even harder to gain traction here and you need to have a very skilled team to effectively market on this site.

Creating content directly for the mainstream media or the technical, alternative media is also a great option, especially if you can get your articles into sites such as Ars Technica, Wired or Mental Floss.