The Power of Cross-Selling Your Site’s Content
January 24, 2008 - Written by Gyutae Park
On average, how many pages does each visitor on your site view before going elsewhere? If your answer is a number less than 2, then you either have a horrible site not worth visiting or you’re not fully utilizing the power of the cross-sell. Cross-selling your content on an article-based site or blog will help you generate more pageviews, attain more subscribers, and ultimately develop a more loyal readership.
First of all, what is a cross-sell? Cross-selling is a commonly used sales technique where customers are intentionally shown other options he or she may not have previously considered. For example, a customer in a cell phone store who asks about a generic flip phone might be shown a feature-packed smart phone along with extra accessories, warranties, and calling plans. As you can imagine, cross-selling will many times result in more profitable sales.
In the same way, you can utilize the cross-selling strategy for your content site to achieve a higher return for every visitor who comes to your site. Below are a few methods that I personally use to guide readers towards more interesting content and to encourage them to further explore the site.
Use inline links to other articles
A commonly used method to cross-sell your content is to convert relevant words or phrases in your articles to links pointing to related pages. This not only gives your old content some more exposure, but it provides value to your readers who might want to learn more about the issues being discussed.
Related posts in posts and feeds
Another easy way to promote additional content is to use lists displaying related posts. If a reader is interested in a specific topic, he or she will likely click through to other articles to learn more. If you’re using Wordpress, a good plugin to display related posts automatically is Wasabi’s Related Entries.
Most popular posts in sidebar
Chances are that your site has a few articles that you are very proud of and are received very well by your readers. Why not feature this content for new readers to see and enjoy? The problem with blog-type sites is that content is pushed down when new articles are published. Featuring popular posts in a highly visible area of the site is a great way to combat this limitation. I recommend using a Wordpress plugin called Popularity Contest to automatically put your best work forward.
Featured posts section
Create a new section or page on your site dedicated to feature articles. This could mean your latest contests and promotions, time-sensitive articles, and other posts you’d like to feature on your site. On Winning the Web, I use a box at the top of the page to list some of the latest events and promotions on the blog. Without the feature section, most people would miss out.
Subscriptions
RSS feed subscriptions are the foundation of any blog or article-based site. To cross-sell your content and your future posts, it’s important to promote your feed and get as many people as possible to subscribe. You can find out how by reading the 11 Ways to Maximize Your Blog’s Subscriber Count.
Are you cross-selling your content? What other methods can you come up with?
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I think the related posts and articles comment is something that stretches across any site. It’s something that I’ll be honest I wish that we did a better job of on the college website. Most people won’t click on the related articles, but some might and all the better for you! Not to mention it does give you a little bit extra internal link juice for your internal search results.
In my experience, readers actually do appreciate the related posts listing and it provides them value. SEO benefits are there as well.
Very nice article & thanks 4 the plugin links.
Sure no problem Andrew. Glad it was helpful to you.