Admiring other content networks

I’ve taken the route of trying to be small publisher covering different niches, and sometimes can’t help but admire the strides some other sites have taken.

Of course, certain networks such as internet.com and ientry have been on webmaster radars for a long time, and give the impression of being somewhat corporate.

However, there are plenty of other players out there - you just have to find them by accident sometimes.

This week I’ve been coding away to develop Motor Daily, a site for the UK car industry, which involved merging a forum (legalstreets.com) and a news site already built on the motor daily domain into a larger site.

It was while I was looking for other car-related forums to engage socially, and of course, drop a link or two where relevant, that I stumbled upon this beauty of a network: autos forum.

Someone has been carving out a presence in a massive range of motoring niches - individual manufacturers, individual car model types, and covering both the US market as well as European and other import markets for an American audience.

I’ve got to admit, when I see a network covering so many different forums I have to tip my hat to whoever is behind it, because that’s a massive amount of work and administration.

And the killer USP is the branding - “by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts”. Free labour. I bet the site design, coding, webmastering and general administration wasn’t, though.

In the meantime, a quick sample of IP data shows the sites are all hosted in same C class, so link benefits on multiple sites is likely to be minimal.

Still, I might turn up and see if I can draw in a couple of uses from one or more of these sites.

And to be honest, if they did the same on my forum, I couldn’t complain.