If you own a website or a blog, it’s a hard feeling to beat when you receive your affiliate payments. Of course, it is always important that you set-up affiliate networks with products/services/companies that you trust and ideally use yourself. One of the easiest ways to do this is through a service such as LinkShare. LinkShare allows you to choose who you will be advertising for, as they have a huge selection of merchants. Once you sign up, which is a very easy process, you can do a search “google style” or browse through their selection of merchants by category or product. You are then forwarded to a page to accept the terms and agreements for that particular merchant, and review their referral fees. Afterwards, you can then review the many options that you have for banner ads and links.

Now… here comes the fun part. Getting YOUR link out, and turning that funny looking bit of text into revenue to use for dinner and a movie. Here are some things that can help:

• Write a blog post, incorporating your new affiliate link
• Place the banner ads in rotation on your site
• Seek out people who need your product (forums and other blogs)
• Run a viral campaign based around one of your affiliates (We can help here!!)
• Don’t forget to include links in your newsletters
• Create an additional page on your site listing all of your affiliates, and why you chose them

Most importantly, remember that when you send people to someone else’s website you are laying out your reputation. Don’t be an affiliate just for the money, make sure you would actually use the product or service.  Check out our some examples by doing a search at TasteVine.

If your trying to sell your wine online, check out this post on “Building a Direct Sales Vehicle“

If you have a product or a service that you offer, chances are you want to use every method possible to spread the word. You have many options to broaden your client/customer base, including one of the most popular, and a service we offer - viral marketing. Affiliate Networking is a type of viral marketing, it serves as great linkbait for viral campaigning, and even better, it acts as an entire sales team motivated and working to build your business. The affiliate broadcasts your product to their entire audience, and you have no ongoing marketing costs unless there is a sale.

Using an affiliate system is a very simple piece of the marketing puzzle… all you need is a website and something to sell.

Here is an overview of the process:
Read the rest of this entry »

With the pendulum starting to swing toward online sales within the wine industry, it’s important that we recognize one of the major differences between the virtual retailer/distributor and the traditional retailer/distributor.

As an online wine outlet, winery or retailer, your website and online engine is your Sales Vehicle. It should be responsible for everything, from how your customers perceive you, how they order your wine, how they are charged, where the order goes, inventory tracking, to even the actual printing of the label in the case of Windsor Vineyards. If your site doesn’t do this, wouldn’t it make your life a lot easier if it did?

If you use traditional methods, you have to communicate these same things to your distributor, who then has to communicate this to a retailer, who then has to communicate that with their stores, who finally puts it on a shelf for the consumer to purchase… and then the information has to funnel back to you. In the words of Tom Friedman, “the world is flat.” With the power of the Internet, there is no longer a need for such an inefficient hierarchal bureaucracy.

Wine 2.0 is already happening, showing the importance of online blogging, marketing, and social interaction, while Tom Wark has comically notified us of the WITS (Wine Industry Technology Symposium), which is the industry’s “this-is-a-very-serious-business” event (www.wineindustrytechnologysymposium.com)… lol. They will cover interesting topics such as sales automation, supply chain technologies, vineyard management systems, etc.

The point is that it’s time to get on board with technology and direct sales, which both allow you to manage your business easier, faster, cheaper, and with more control. With your sales engine having so much responsibility, it stands to reason that you would want to have something that is well-oiled, fast, smooth, and reliable. Unfortunately there isn’t a Sales Vehicle you can take for a test drive, as most require some custom work before they are ready to roll. This leaves you with quite a bit of research/legwork to be done when all you want to do is drive.

We are starting a series that will help you make the right decisions along your journey to “Building a Direct Sales Vehicle”. It will include choosing the right sales engine and designing your website, handling delivery and logistics, and gaining exposure in the online marketplace. We welcome discussion from all the service providers in these categories, (though we already have done the research and have our preferences), as we hope this series will make it a lot easier for those trying to get set-up in direct sales, and facilitate a faster change within the industry.

• Read Building A Direct Sales Vehicle Part II 

One of the things I like the most about wine is the small shops that sell it. Yes there are big distributors and outlets, but it is amazing how important and interesting the network of small shops can be. While they may not have the selection of the larger stores, the small shops are communities that prove invaluable when it comes to learning about, talking about, or finding wine. If you are looking to learn more about wine, visiting your local merchant is a great way to do it and maybe make some friends in the process.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that wine has been so slow in coming to the online table, is that it has always had the feel of a small and networked community in the real world. Much like the social communities now found on the web, this wine shop network is one of the few places in business today where they will make every effort to go out of their way to help you. As someone who is relatively new to the depths of wine, I’ve found it incredibly important to pick the collective brains of the owners of a small network of shops around where I live. Sure, some shops are better than others and you do have to experience a lot (visiting a lot of wine shops might not be the most terrible thing in the world), but by frequenting the shops near me I have been able to pick up on the knowledge of the staff and this has helped me accelerate my learning curve a great deal. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by the recommendations of wine store staff.

Typically I’m skeptical when a store employee recommends a product to me. Perhaps it is the entrepreneur in me that wonders why they are telling me to buy this specific product and what’s in it for them. I can honestly say, though, that most of the people I’ve met who work in or own a wine shop do it out of love or passion, they genuinely love to share their experiences and their new finds; much like members of today’s online communities. Sure, some shops may get special benefits from pushing a certain wine (that’s good business) but on the whole I’m rarely disappointed by wines that the shops recommend to me.

When it comes to the wine shop I think it is important that a wine newbie find one they’re comfortable with. The shop can become a knowledge resource for you as you learn and the experienced staff there can become friends and mentors on your journey into wine. While you might pay a little more at your local shop than you would at a big box outlet, the knowledge you can gain and the people you can meet more than makes up for the money you would save by shopping elsewhere. The next step of course is to successfully transition this wonderful real world community to the world of web 2.0. Thankfully advances are being made with the advent of sites like Corkd, Calwineries, and Tastevine, which approach different segments of the younger market.

Now if someone were to ask me for my opinion on how the small wine shop could do a better job of staying in business, I’d take them back to my previous post. The details I’ve previously outlined apply as directly to the wine shop and the entire wine community as they do to the producers themselves. If any members of the wine community are still a bit unsure of how to make the leap or are interested in making the leap, feel free to contact us.

I’ve had an unbelievable two weeks with much good food, hundreds of 1 ounce wine pours, great restaurants, changing cities, cool people and a lot of business. We’ve just touched down in Atlanta and are reflecting on an amazing two weeks and the culmination of it all undoubtedly being Wine 2.0 at Club Sportiva last night.

Left to Right: Ben (CalWineries.com); Gary V., G-Man (*www.thetastevine.com) and me

Stepping out of the virtual world and into the reality of Wine 2.0 was pretty neat, especially to be in the same room with Gary V., Inertia’s Andrea, Tom Wark, Wine Hiker Russ, Alder Yarrow and everyone else playing in this circle.

G-man and myself were the youngest guys by 5 and 3 years respectively - and that’s not to say that it was an older crowd. If anything, having come from the traditional route of working in on-premise and off-premise sales, everyone in the room was a baby compared to the aging 3-tier crowd. It is inspirational to be in a game that is dominated by young players.

To listen to the panel last night, it is a relief to hear people who not only understand how to, but have begun to take wine from a prohibitionist era mindset into the 21st Century (where everyone else is.) Gary is leading the charge, Inertia is laying the tracks and Tom Wark has spread the message. The stadium is built and the people will come.

Grape Thinking, TasteVine and people like the dudes at CalWineries are fortunate to be able to start down the path that has been cleared for us. Whilst Bottlenotes, RadCru, Wine Q and Cork’d are doing a good job giving an online platform to the established wine appreciation crew - Grape Thinking and Taste Vine are working to bring our love for food and wine into the same mix as our understanding of the digital era.

It was great to share the same vision with those who have begun to make it happen. There’s space for all of us to be successful - and with so much opposition at every step, we’re going to need all the force we can muster. Having had a great 2 weeks I’d like to take the chance to propose a digital toast to all the young self-starters in the room last night: the future is ours.