Pimping your stuff in forum posts and sigs like I'm doing above (hopefully tastefully) works. I would suggest you need to get over being shy about it and your first post should have had the URL. Also, track down anyone who blogs about your area (social news sites/poll sites) and contact them to let them announce you and or start commenting intelligently on their blogs.

Google will start bringing digg-like sites traffic based on your unique keyword combos after a while. I would post to some free directories to boost pagerank (but not paid links or directories) to help this happen sooner. There are also free forums for link announcements. These won't bring you much traffic directly, but google still is awarding some rank for the links and you will probably start placing for off-beat combos. I was getting google traffic for "huffing purel" for a while after a friend made a comment joking about that.

Google Analytics is a great tool. I suggest adwords to get some starter traffic. Be warned, my users were so lazy ( less than 1% post and almost none vote) that I started populating it using scrapers. They will lurk though and read your content. So if you get bored talking to yourself, try and build traffic fast. Avoid Adbrite if you do this--the traffic is worthless.

Anyhow, those are my tips...

1. Nobody wants to join an empty social site. Either do it yourself or pay some people in 3rd world countries to have multiple accounts on your site and make it look popular. Each story should have hundreds of votes and there should be 10s if not hundreds of comments, its better if there is heated debate or discussion going on in the comments

2. Once it has the appearance of being popular, Time to make it popular.

-You could pretend to be a ron paul supporter and point out to other ron paul supporters that ron paul is getting the bad end of one your questions, and then 1000s of ron paul supporters would rush to your site to correct it.

-You could make a facebook app for it.

-You could do traditional advertising on other news or news related blogs.

Before Google came along, the search space looked pretty mature with plenty of entrenched players.

how is it different?

if this is your site, then i would describe it as a way to poll people about a website with user submitted options to vote on.

digg is a 1 metric site, your site adds value by allowing people to define their own metrics.

If you take the time to study these folks, you'll do much better. And if you're unable to convince them that your site's worth their while to use, then it probably isn't going to be a hit with your target group. Compared to any of the mass media approaches, this will cost less and work better.

we've just launched a free service http://www.freemyfriends.com that lets your users find their friends who are already members of your site without violating your user's privacy. We're looking for new startups to see if they are interested in using this service.

We're working on making the website look prettier, but we wanted to get it out to gauge market demand.

4 ways to market your business online: http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/04/magazines/fsb/online.marketi...

http://botspiritcompany.com/botlist/

DROP THE GOOGLE ADS UNTIL YOU GET REAL TRAFFIC.