A new shop opened on Diagon Alley this week. It is called Merlin's Marketing Marvels. Their owner is a an emancipated house elf who has a curiously eccentric rule: you only ever get to buy one thing from his shop.
I submit that, if you choose the Wand Of Always Hit The HN Front Page, you've made a clearly suboptimal choice, and if you've chosen Wand Of Sometimes Complain About HN Front Page, that's just nuts.
There may or may not be voting rings. A particular article may or may not have them behind it. If the truth of the universe about either of these facts changed, would that affect what is the rational course of action for your business today? I strongly suggest that it wouldn't.
In a universe with or without vote rings, one would be well-advised to start building a permission channel under one's own control, such that one can routinely get into contact with people who will like what one has to offer. Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like.
I will guarantee you, from a wee bit of experience, that the business value of X00 people who are actually in your market greatly exceeds the value of an HN frontpaging, and you can send things to a mailing list bi-weekly, whereas a) waving the magic wand of HN frontpage bi-weekly is taxing even if you can do it and b) you will probably burn out your wand's welcome.
If you hate email, you're handicapping yourself unnecessarily, but you can do similar things with RSS feeds or Twitter accounts. (But seriously, email ROFLstomps those alternatives.)
Another option is finding a "beat" for yourself (journalism term) and owning the "'$(#'% out of it. I'd tend to suggest high-value beats with low-competition adjacent to spaces of commercial interest for you. You'd be amazed how short the path to being "the acknowledged expert" on a particular subject is if you pick your subject well. After you're the expert, you'll start just showing up in places without actively inserting yourself there, and your perceived expertise will tend to snowball. (Both because organic mentions of you tend to be perceived as more credible than tooting your own horn, and because you will be given credibility-enhancing opportunities by other people because they perceive benefit from association with you. You can also explicitly pitch that to them.)
"Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like."
Let me add to that.
Find any reason you can to reply to both customers and non-customers (we happen to get misdirected inquires all the time. We try to convert these inquires that we take the time to answer with a coupon and a "use us next time" blurb).
Anyway, for customers, this "legit" spam if you want to call it that takes the form of helpful, personal, genuine "follow up" emails (pre-written in a conversational tone in advance and with things that make them look as if they are unique (we use quicktext on thunderbird but there are other ways to do this obviously)) which could say something like "we made that address change that you requested let me know if you need anything further" (more involved but basically just a nice note). So see the idea is not to always have everything to be "self service". If you can afford the labor hit, or the labor hit leads to actual sales maybe encourage customer co-dependency because it gets them to contact you. Of course this is going to totally depend on the business you are in and of course you don't want to annoy customers by doing it to much.
The bottom line is "always be selling". Use any interaction by email as a chance to either enhance the customer relationship or make a suggestion for something else they might need.
It's also way the heck easier to get emails, provided that you give them some motivation to sign on. It's inherently a private, low-risk transaction (provided that your signaling is consistent).
As to domain expertise, "well-known value-producing field" x "very specific customers whose needs you deeply understand" is both sufficient and awesomely effective.
I submit that, if you choose the Wand Of Always Hit The HN Front Page, you've made a clearly suboptimal choice, and if you've chosen Wand Of Sometimes Complain About HN Front Page, that's just nuts.
There may or may not be voting rings. A particular article may or may not have them behind it. If the truth of the universe about either of these facts changed, would that affect what is the rational course of action for your business today? I strongly suggest that it wouldn't.
In a universe with or without vote rings, one would be well-advised to start building a permission channel under one's own control, such that one can routinely get into contact with people who will like what one has to offer. Get folks' email addresses. Send them stuff they'll like.
I will guarantee you, from a wee bit of experience, that the business value of X00 people who are actually in your market greatly exceeds the value of an HN frontpaging, and you can send things to a mailing list bi-weekly, whereas a) waving the magic wand of HN frontpage bi-weekly is taxing even if you can do it and b) you will probably burn out your wand's welcome.
If you hate email, you're handicapping yourself unnecessarily, but you can do similar things with RSS feeds or Twitter accounts. (But seriously, email ROFLstomps those alternatives.)
Another option is finding a "beat" for yourself (journalism term) and owning the "'$(#'% out of it. I'd tend to suggest high-value beats with low-competition adjacent to spaces of commercial interest for you. You'd be amazed how short the path to being "the acknowledged expert" on a particular subject is if you pick your subject well. After you're the expert, you'll start just showing up in places without actively inserting yourself there, and your perceived expertise will tend to snowball. (Both because organic mentions of you tend to be perceived as more credible than tooting your own horn, and because you will be given credibility-enhancing opportunities by other people because they perceive benefit from association with you. You can also explicitly pitch that to them.)