Cross-Selling: Can a Site be Too Big to Consider the Opportunity?	Visited: 1219 Not rated Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Steve Campus August 18, 2009

Advertisers continue to grapple with the Internet as a pathway for their clients’ messages and at the same time measure the converting effect of message with an actual purchase. This seems to be an ongoing issue and unless the site is the actual shopping site there is a problem that presents a major challenge to the advertiser:

For a social networking site with millions of users, or even hundreds of thousands of user, they need a revenue stream that produces sales for their advertisers. For the advertiser they must recognize that small sites support the “long tail theory.” That is, selling products (even in small amounts) to the end of the tail will produce large profits. In this context there is a barrier that has to be overcome by the site owners in order to be successful.

If a site that sells products teams up with a site that has either a platform or targeted member demographic to help sell the product, then both sites will win. The barrier today is that these types of cross-selling arrangements are not viewed as the norm because the largest of sites with members, especially the social network sites, do not value the small selling sites. Those small selling sites don’t have enough attraction for the large member sites to make a revenue share deal. There in lies the need for change:

Whether it is a clearinghouse for such deals that need to be created, or merely recognition of the advertisers that they want to mine the small sites for sales, both will bring positive change and increased sales to the product sites and companies.

A quick case study of cross-selling with Bottlenotes.com and our own social networking site Boomster.com:

Wine from estate wineries is the product. Boomster.com demographic is a small, but growing 45 and over audience.   Bottlenotes has members generally between 25 and 45 years old. Tapping into Bottlenotes’ highly targeted audience, Boomster was able to leverage its original video content platform in order to launch a revenue-share deal with Bottlenotes, so both sites could reap the full benefits.