“Break-in” opportunities:

Your put your name, hyperlinked, next to lots of interesting comments on popular blogs, or linkposts (like Digg, but start with smaller specific communities) etc
You make a mixtape, including your own song alongside really popular (commonly searched for) songs, then put it up on P2P with easy way to identify your site
You create a really interesting top-level domain idea such as the million dollar homepage or cool mashup, and then link to your blog
You go to events that A-listers attend, and talk to them about their great ideas so they link to you on their blog
You sign up in communities using your website as your username
You team up with two or three other people to pool your oxygen

Those are just some random ideas. I’m pretty sure that it’s actually not that hard to get a notice or two for anything you do - and easier the more work you put into it w/in a community context. And really my point was not that it’s easy but that community is the only place where you can associate your own content with higher-value content without paying for it
Next though you have to get people to come back. That’s mostly a matter of branding: tightly couple the content and the author/site/etc. For instance sometimes I’ll get mails from someone, two links on different days, and they don’t even realize that the two articles they’re sending me were by the same person or from the same site. That’s a missed opportunity for the original author. So is using someone else’s branding - for instance, people send links to an art photoset on flickr, which is convenient, but when someone looks at the art it’s often a few clicks away to the person’s profile and gallery website etc. Instead use the Flickr APIs to automatically include the art on your own site.

It’s also about making two-way conversation. For instance: I revisit random blogs that I’ve commented on. Of course it’s expensive (time-wise) to make every marketing effort a two-way conversation.

Anyway these are all pretty generic suggestions ’cause there’s no one way. I’ve never really tried to market things but I do know that when I’ve created a useful utility or whatever, it gets traffic (was getting 5-10 mails per day at one point on some scripting tools I wrote… I don’t *want* that traffic.) And I was never trying to make $$, so I might approach it differently if I wanted to do that. Words are easiest to “market” but hard to monetize. Something like music is harder to host, and there are fewer places where you can place it in context of other popular items. Actually it’s probably pretty hard to sell, too, since it’s so easy to create music today, so there’s a lot of free, “OK” stuff available. I guess my play there would be to market to industry rather than individuals, like my friend who got his stuff on the Matrix DVD soundtrack by heavy participation in a music community, or mashup artists who got radioplay & remix jobs by way of participating in DJ nights. Etc.

I’ll save my rambling on compensation for the next time we’re hangin’ out… which I hope is soon!

I really should have written this up as two separate dimensions / spectra: how content gets promoted, and how content gets discovered. It’s all so blurry, though, at least to me.

I’m all for survival of the fittest as regards content and ideas. The puzzle to me is how best to nurture newborn content for a little while… long enough to give it a real chance at surviving on its own merit. (In many animal species, parents nurture and protect the kids until the kids are mature enough to fend for themselves. Same idea here.)

“All you have to do is be consistently interesting, in the context of a particular community.” From what I’ve read, this understates how hard it is to break into the A-list. Being consistently interesting is necessary but not sufficient. Being first mover helps. Reciprocal linking helps. Evangelism. PR. Etc.

New York Magazine has a relevant article “Blogs to Riches - The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom” http://newyorkmetro.com/news/media/15967/index.html The article supports your point on money being thrown at both ends of the spectrum. It also describes how the process of creating of blogs for commercial gain is becoming more and more sophisticated… just like it did in other mediums. In particular read about the Huffington Post.

Thanks as always for the insights. Love co-comment. We need portable reputation in the online world, just like we need portable identity.

P.S. No fair dissing the comp ideas without saying why they won’t scale. I don’t actually know of any comp system that scales well, especially over the long term. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it sometime.

PS Since I don’t have a blog, I can’t even get any fractional oxygen for all this writing!

I think you’re right about the poles of your push-pull spectrum but missing the most interesting part for those needing O2. Yeah, for traditional marketing at the “latter end”, $$ has always equaled attention. Pretty soon that will be true for the “former” end, too. Pull mode is definitely *not* passive for publishers - the trick to marketing to pull, as you say, is to know where to be… and that takes work. But the search engine cos are the ones collecting that data, so they’re the ones monetizing it. We’ll have to work harder and harder to find bargain keywords until it’s no easier than finding good PR.

So if both “Pull” and “Push” are, or at least are becoming, big-money operations then where’s the cheap attention? It’s right in the middle where you have listed things like subscriptions & recommendations. Basically, blogs, forums, & community-specific sites plus technology built around them. Good: These harness global discussion & massive decision-making efforts without really charging you for participation (so far.) Bad: They discriminate, so if your content really isn’t any good then you will have to fall back on paying $. Good & Bad: You only get out proportional to what you put in (factored by some multiplier) because reputation requires investment. It’s a sweet spot because, at least for now, technology advancements (collab. filtering, meme trackers, etc.) are helping to better your own effort-in / value-out efficiencies without charging you, because the house always converts a % of attention to cash via contextual ads…

I can imagine a lot of ways in which this will eventually dry up - for one thing, as AdSense-like technologies mature you might even find that main story content faces competition from the paid sidebars? In other words, influencer sites start letting people pay to post topics to their page, just like search engines did for ads. But for now there’s nothing like the bang-for-buck of becoming a part of “A-list” discussions. All you have to do is be consistently interesting, in the context of a particular community.

BTW in my restated spectrum, I wouldn’t put “browsing” in the middle, it really belongs at both extreme ends, since most links are directed by $$

Anyway, sorry for all the generalities, but when you include all forms of marketing in a single spectrum then I guess you’re asking for a load of BS I have some specific ideas (some of which I’d mentioned to Darek actually) if we get a chance to chat later!