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.)