An excellent way to market services, products, or articles on your site or blog is to display related content on your posts or pages.  Often referred to as cross-selling – you are providing your site visitors with information or products that are (hopefully) something they might be interested in learning more about.  Since you already have them on your site, the goal is to get them to stay longer, dig deeper, and become more connected and informed with what you offer.

Whether you are promoting content or products, cross-selling or cross-promotion can be invaluable to your visitors.

How to Cross-Sell

There are a couple different ways that you can cross-sell on your site or blog:

• WordPress

  If you use WordPress to power your site or blog, then you are in luck.  There are several plugins that will automatically display related posts and pages on your site.  Here on BigManta, I use this strategy to provide useful information to my visitors as well as show off content that they might not have otherwise found.  The plugin I use is called Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) – and use it on several of my other sites as well.  YARPP automatically combs through your content to find posts that are relevant to each other, it then displays a list of links at the bottom of your post.

• Manual Linking

  Whether you run on WordPress or not, manually linking items that are mentioned in your pages are an excellent way to bring value to your content.  Simply choose words or display a list of related pages that are linked at the end of your page of content – and you will see immediate results.

Great for affiliate marketing

A great way to convert people into buying is also by using text links to promote affiliate products.  If you’re interested in increasing conversions (and making more money), you can check out my post on how to maximize your earnings here: Using Contextual Links to Boost Your Affiliate Marketing Income