Good old fashioned trading and swapping of goods and services is a time tested way to get more bang for your business buck. In fact, you can often get away without spending any of your hard earned business revenue, with some well planned trades.
Often bartering simply involves a swapping of services. For example, web designers trade work with search engine optimization (SEO) professionals. Writers will often trade their services as copywriters and article authors for other services. Sometimes products are acquired in return for working for the product vendor.
The list of trading and bartering combinations is almost endless. It's only limited by your imagination and creativity.
One of the best known trades is for advertising space. In return for placing an ad for a product or service, the business often receives the item placed in the ad copy. Bloggers trade articles and posts all of the time. In blogging, bartering is so widely used, it's become one of most powerful, but less well known benefits of maintaining a blog.
Article exchanges in newsletters are a popular barter. Also high on the trading list is newsletter advertising, where you and your new partnership offer one anothers ads in your respective newsletters. Often, these exchanges grow into joint ventures, offering one anothers mailing lists the products and services of your new barter business partner. The barter transforms into a recommendation and helps one another to grow their mailing list and customer base. A win-win for sure.
If you have some ad space available on your blog, you might consider offering the space in return for products and services. It's better to get something for a blank advertising space than nothing. Over the longer term, the bartering partnership can often grow into cash or referral business.
Be sure to offer your products and services in exchange for almost any business transaction your company is undertaking. You never know when the vendor might prefer your trading offer to an unfilled time slot or space. They might even be looking for your particular service at the very time of your approach. By offering the exchange, you have helped your new business associate save money, and their budget, as well. Everyone wins in the end.
In fact, if you are offering barter, place some exchange offers right on your blog or website. All you need is to find one other business who matches your needs; and you can fulfil their requirements. Think of barter as a one business and one person at a time transaction.
Be sure to include one another in your client lists, and share product and service testimonials. Mention one another on your blogs and newsletters. By helping one another out without spending cash, you can often add paying customers and clients as a result. The trade helps you to go from no cash barter arrangements to real money transactions. Now that's real magic.
Small business people, and that includes most bloggers, should look into making barter business happen for their companies. You never know what cam result from the partnership.
Think bartering, and trade your way up to a larger online or offline business.
