Office Memo to the new Online Sales Team

TO: Lake Onondaga Vineyard Online Sales Team

FROM: David Cox, Lead Blogger

CC: Ruth Smith, CEO

DATE: August 12, 2012

SUBJECT: Online Ad and Sponsorship Opportunities

As per your request, I have collected five ideas for Advertising and Sponsorship opportunities online.

1. Contextual Advertising: We do not currently have ads on the blog, but we could. We have a specific topic, and contextual advertising should get us ads for wine, vineyards, and accessories. Better yet, if we controlled this a bit, we could advertise for, say, vineyards we had visited with Wines of the World. These are ads someone might click through, and this would drive revenue. I know you have been considering ads on the blog, and I am agreeing that they could work. However, they cannot be our whole plan.
2. Affiliate Program: A better plan for working with other vineyards and online wine sales would be with an affiliate program. Linking in to online stores selling our wines, and those we have toured, it will be like every wine I mention is a potential ad in and of itself. What is great about this is it does not change what I have been doing – it just allows us to drive some revenue from it.
3. Merchandise: We are lacking somewhat in the merchandise department. We have a large enough wine club now that we could sell T-Shirts, wine glasses, and other items. Yes, we should have the name of the Vineyard on these items. But corporate sponsors being on them as well would be good. After all, we would need the capital to create the merchandise first, and then make money as we sell items. Sponsorship would help us do this.
4. Free Shipping: How do we make money from free shipping, you ask? Sponsored free shipping. Have a sponsor pay for free shipping, and we include a catalog from the sponsor in the shipment. Catalogs work, or I wouldn’t get so many in my mail. They may work better when they are coming along with some wine you paid nothing to ship. That’s a catalog I would look through. Especially if we got some sponsors that had good wine accessories, like Williams and Sonoma. Or else maybe wine stores themselves.
5. Weekend Getaway: We have a vineyard, a tasting room, and a bed and breakfast. With a corporate sponsor or two, we could quite easily do a weekend getaway. Maybe work in with the local radio stations. Or maybe something online, and get an airline in on it. Lots of options, and it could drive membership, visibility, and be a fun thing for someone to win.

These are my ideas. Quite frankly, I think we could implement all of them, thanks to the manpower that the Online Sales Team brings to the table. You can get the affiliates and sponsors together, and I can keep the traffic coming to the site, and keep the members in the loop. Working together, we can grow the effectiveness of the blog without having to majorly change it.