As I have stated before, it is my duty, as messenger, to deliver the most important messages. And there are two messages that are more important than all others: (1) love your neighbor and (2) tell the truth.

And thus, I created Love and Truth. Available for free and in online stores everywhere!

But alas, creating love and truth is not enough; for now that I have created these messages, I must fulfill my destiny as messenger, and deliver these most important messages to all. So here is how I'm marketing Love and Truth:

Last.fm. In addition to uploading it to Last.fm, I also tried a Last.fm Powerplay campaign. This is where you spend money to get it paid to Last.fm listeners. You get to target the song to very specific audio demographics. For instance, I marketed my song for Sara to Sara Bareilles fans, and my song for Jason to Jason Mraz fans.

I do not find this advertising model to be that great. Perhaps it is worth it if you are operating on a larger budget, as it could generate positive results -- though in terms of getting the most out of your money, I think there are better options. I spent $20 per song, which got me 100 listens of that song to the demographics I targeted. About 2% of the people banned the song, saying they hated it. Can you believe that?!??! You know we're living in troubled times when people hate Love and Truth.

YouTube. YouTube remains my favorite and most successful marketing venue. Not like I've had much success with it, but it's gotten me free traffic and free views, and costs me no money -- only time and passion. Love and truth, you might say.

Like everything on the Internet, YouTube is an instant feedback loop, meaning it remains a way to immediately gauge feedback on an ongoing basis, via comments and ratings. This can then help determine what deserves further marketing efforts. Thus far, my song for Aimee and my song for Jason have received the best receptions. Though obviously we are dealing with limited data sets, as the number of views is still under 1,000 for each of them.

TuneCore. TuneCore is a service that lets you distribute your music to online retailers and streaming services -- Napster, Rhapsody, iTunes, etc -- for a small fee. Even though I encourage and am delighted by free distribution of my music, I think it is still advantageous to be in these stores, as people will find and purchase them that way. The streaming services in particular, as people can enjoy them at no additional cost from there. I am a Napster subscriber and love the service. For $15 a month it is fantastic.

Bloggers. If promoting Love and Truth was my job rather than just a hobby -- meaning if I had more time and dedicated myself fully to it -- I'd be mailing physical copies of Love and Truth to bloggers that accept submissions. Thus far, I've only submitted my song to Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and mp3 blogger (here is his blog; here is the song I wrote for him). I sent him my song for Marc Andreessen. I hope some of you Internet business people appreciate how funny it is that I wrote a song for Marc thanking him for being a 9/11 Truther. I'm sure a lot of you are like "WTF is up with this guy" but there's gotta be at least a few of you that are ROFLing like I am. I mean imagine if we got that song on Techmeme. It'd change the world! And we'd be laughing our asses off too!!! But ya'll are a bunch of punk ass chumps, just like Jay-Z. Don't want a good chuckle, don't want to tell the Truth. Ya'll can't handle Love and Truth! In stores everywhere!

Anyway, I am very much a believer that bloggers hold the future of Internet marketing in their hands. They will end up having the most valuable destinations. Popular and influential bloggers like Fred Wilson will then want to leverage their influence by allocating attention to other products and services, and earning revenue for doing so. And thus, we see things like Fred Wilson incorporate a radio -- which is branded as Fred Wilson Radio -- and a bunch of widgets from other web services on his site. Strangely enough, I am more bullish on Fred's blog than on many investments in his portfolio (and I think very highly of his portfolio, though macroeconomic concerns are larger for those companies than they are for Fred's blog, which essentially has no employees, given that Fred himself is a venture capitalist and not a full-time blogger. So it is a profitable business in a growing market with no full-time employees. Pretty cool!).

Of course that is how I see it, though I am of course deeply biased, as I am in the business of creating and marketing bloggers and Internet publishers.

Selling Out to Love and Truth

I am all about selling out, and thus am very interested in maximizing money generated from Love and Truth. However, I have no intention of focusing on selling it (though I have generated some revenue via iTunes...thank you for that, whoever is out there buying. Though feel free to get it for free, rip it off YouTube, etc).

My monetization model, though, is instead that of a blogger: build a community, and then use my influence to sell them stuff. To build influence, I can allocate attention to other things I think are cool. Thus, we have Kid Mercury Video News Channel, and Kid Mercury Music Channel. We also have Truth School. I'll also be adding guitar lessons shortly. And the daily message lets you get something original from me.

So let's fast forward to a world where my songs have gained widespread dissemination. The message has successfully been delivered; mankind now knows Love and Truth, and thus has awoken to its destiny. Accordingly, my web site has become popular. I have leveraged this to amass great influence by allocating attention to other products, services, videos, music, and written articles. Most importantly, hot chicks love me and tell me what a stud I am.

Now to monetize this scenario, I can simply recommend stuff to buy, and can profit accordingly, both by direct partnerships with vendors and with affiliate arrangements with aggregator intermediaries like Amazon (i.e. Amazon already has partnerships with everyone, and so I can simply resell stuff I like from Amazon as an Amazon affiliate). I can also then use my community as a talent filter to find other personalities I find compelling, and can help them become stars (we talked more about this in our post on the future of social networking). In doing so, I can work out revenue sharing agreements with them.

Additional monetization opportunities would be letting my friends sell their products and services, or to sell other services that I can fulfill directly myself. For instance, if I was a touring musician, I could sell concert tickets. One thing I was planning on setting up was a private forum where people can talk about the currency markets with me, where I would introduce it to them, show how they can get involved, etc. A private consultation forum, for which a fee would be charged. What is being sold is my service and experience in trading currency, as well as the contributions of others who joined and participated in this private community.

This is where my business is headed. We currently have one site that is up and profitable. We are still focusing on marketing that, as developing a framework for marketing that we can roll out to all the niche blog communities we want to create is still something we are working on. We also have to work out the logistics of how we are going to sell this to other Internet publishers, as well as how we are going to create network value (i.e. creating value by connecting all the niche communities we create). So there is still a lot to sort out, but much of it will sort itself out as these communities grow and take on a life of their own.

With that said, below is an image I created before in my attempts at fleshing out what a sales pitch might look like:


Still not sure about calling it ActoWorld. I like it, but most people I meet dislike the term "ActoWorld." ActoBlog is something I like a lot too, and perhaps a bit more intuitive and easier to understand. Though people have a problem with the Acto prefix, which I quite like, makes me chuckle. Hmm. Still have a lot of time on that issue, so it ultimately is not too consequential at this point.

Kid Mercury is Open for Business

If you are a publisher or work with publishers -- and by publishers I mean writers, filmmakers, musicians....content creators -- and find my ideas interesting and see ways we can work together, don't hesitate to holla at me. I'm destined to be a very successful person, and if you are too, then we should definitely work together.

A Special Note to Evil Record Labels

I know you're evil and all -- hence the name Evil Record Label. But you should let me help you clean up that poor reputation of yours. Sponsoring the Truth is a great way for you to do that. You sold your soul to the devil; now's your chance to buy it back.

Besides, your business is done. You think people are going to buy records as this depression deepens? Especially when they can hop on the web and download it for free? LOL. Sorry folks, but the game's over. Time for the new game to begin.

That's where I come in.

So if you have thoughts on how we can work together, be sure to holla at me. Otherwise, I'll be in touch when I have a proposal and a few working models I can show you.