http://www.barterexchangetrainers.com/our-programs/the-complete-employee-package/

First, as you can see, the web site itself has had a major look and feel update, with easier navigation and a more clear purpose. If you have purchased programs in the past, you will still be able to access the information directly from the urls you received in previous emails.

Second, we have added a couple of important documents to the Forms, Documents, and Agreements section of the All Access program, namely a Sample Job Description, a Sample Recruiting Process, a Sample Strategic Plan, and a Sample Training Manual. You can find these updates here: http://www.barterexchangetrainers.com/our-programs/6mostoprosperity/forms-documents-and-agreements/

We hope the process of building your exchange is going smoothly and prosperously. Remember, if you need any specific questions answered or have needs not being fulfilled by one of our programs, don’t hesitate to reach us at any time.

Happy trading!

Here’s the basic concept: You work with business owners. Business owners, by nature, are busy. Busy people forget all about holidays, even holidays that celebrate their wives, their children, or their parents and extended family. They forget that Halloween is around the corner, and probably only remember Christmas because they are in retail and it makes a huge difference to their bottom line.

Most barter exchanges limit their holiday offerings and promotions to a couple of basic holidays: Christmas and Valentine’s Day (maybe). A resourceful barter exchange owner will take the time to promote all interesting holidays. Some that I would recommend putting packages together for include Spring Break, St Patrick’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, the 4th of July, Memorial Day (think vacation or stay-cation ideas), Halloween, Thanksgiving, and obviously Christmas.

Most business owners check either email, text messages, voice mail messages, or one of their social networking accounts on a daily basis.

A simple email or text listing a dozen or so options for your client to purchase for an upcoming holiday can do a multitude of things for your business. Your member feels like they are getting their money’s worth, that you are doing a good job, and most likely you’ll experience an increase in volume and make more money. Why? Because you did what they don’t have time or the desire to do: figure out what to do for the holiday.

For example, for mother’s day you could promote the traditional items like flowers, spa certificates, massage, and jewelry. An enterprising barter exchange owner would go farther. After a little time thinking, you could create a secondary list, a list of things that mother’s would want but maybe not think about like a family portrait session that could be given as a gift certificate. Maybe the mother in your client’s life would want to get some remodeling done and you happen to have a new painting company. Perhaps you have a new bed and breakfast that could be promoted, or a cabin rental, so that your client’s mother could have a night off.

By reaching deep in to the list of clients you have and promoting even the most vague of holiday-related things for the upcoming holiday, you show your clients how resourceful you are, how much you are thinking about them, and how good your service is.

This is paramount in the barter industry. How much service you render to clients will be THE indicator of your income. If you are showing great service, you’ll make good money. Service in the barter industry means opening new doors to new ideas and promoting your clients internally and externally. It means making clients aware of things they have never thought about, and providing them with new and exciting ways to spend their barter. Holidays are a great time to communicate those ideas.

Part of the training I provide for barter exchanges includes learning to think this way. Thinking around the box for barter exchange owners is one of the best ways to create new opportunities. If you are interested in learning more about how our training can help you maximize your exposure and volume, please contact us at 801-618-4901.

In the mean time, get out your calendar, look at the upcoming holidays, and jot down some notes about what you can and will package and promote.

There are new community currencies being created daily. Some groups are choosing paper money as their medium of exchange. Others are having silver coins minted that are then used inside the community for purposes of exchange. In a more innovative move, some are turning to time banks, which value one hour of whatever work you perform as the medium of exchange. All of them have problems, all have drawbacks, and all of them miss the mark in some way.

Starting with paper community currencies…most of the community currencies I have read about are being created as a complimentary currency to the national currency. Most of them are limited to communities, which isn’t terrible in itself, but they also are requiring an exchange of national dollars to acquire the community dollars.

Coined currencies have the same problem. You have to give up your national dollars in exchange for a coined currency. The proponents of this system want a return to the gold standard, assuming, falsely, that the value of gold has always been solid, is very solid, and will always be solid. Ditto for silver. The problem I see is this…in the middle of a famine, who will care about gold and silver? If the survivalists are right and the apocalypse is around the corner, then food and water will hold their value and increase much more than gold and silver.

There is another problem with coined currencies: they are based on scarcity. There is never enough coinage to go around, so economics becomes an endless chasing of precious metals. The same could apply with any commodity that a community used as its currency.

It also seems there isn’t a great concensus on how to get community dollars out in to a community without resorting to a straight currency conversion for the national currency. Let me ask you this…if you owned a business, would you pay cash to buy a community dollar, even if it was slightly discounted (as many of them are)? I wouldn’t.

Then there is the barter system. In its classic sense it is a quid pro quo system. I give you my eggs, you give me your milk. This part of barter has been done to death in the last couple of years.

Move on to barter exchanges. They are closer to the real solution, in my opinion. Barter exchanges don’t require you to turn in your cash dollars for barter dollars. Instead, they become issuers of credit and managers of a currency. You own a business, you belong to a barter exchange, chances are you have a credit line that you can use for your business. Once the line is used, you can start marketing yourself to other participating businesses and off it goes. In theory, it remains a zero balance economy, with exactly the same amout of credit issued as outstanding barter dollars to be used. Barter exchanges do run for a cash profit, and thus a small downside is that you pay a cash transaction fee for every transaction you participate in, generally. That drains your national dollars a bit, as does the drain on your inventory, but considerably less than working inside community dollars.

Now, to incorporate value in to the conversation….the American dollar is backed by the U.S. Treasury, which declares that all loans made to the government will be repaid from tax dollars, and the Federal Reserve, which regulates the amount of currency in circulation. In other words, the American dollar is backed solely by the social agreement that we have in the world that the government has authority to tax our work, and pay its debts. And we all agree that it is the medium of exchange of preference.

Community currencies are backed by the same principle, the social agreement, as are barter dollars. The call for a return to an objective standard of currency is based on scarsity, because there is never enough of any one commodity to go around. Our current system of fiat currency backed by a social agreement is more efficient, and more effective at promoting growth than any other system available to us.

I’ve been coaching a number of individuals for the last six months, and I keep tabs on the barter industry through the BarterNewsWeekly.com website, which I own and manage, and two related themes have floated to the surface of the industry chatter and experience. Both are subsets of one major idea: the barter industry isn’t great at making suggestions.

First, from the prospect of technology, most internet barter websites to a TERRIBLE job of suggesting things for you to try to barter for. I’ve done half a dozen video reviews of internet barter websites in the last four days. ONE of them actually had the cahones to suggest that I might want something. They all do a decent job of getting me to sign up, providing a place for me to place an ad for the things I want to trade away, but then are sorely lacking in the area of suggesting or even letting me search for things I want to get. Come on! Make a global search work! There’s got to be a programmer out there that understands that actually posting something you want to trade is only the first step, and arguably the easiest step, of a barter transaction?! I’m very frustrated by the lack of attention given to the suggestion part of the equation.

The only site to provide me with any suggestions as to what I might want is neighborgoods.net, who showed me a list of things in my geographic area that are available to borrow. It’s not even a true barter site, but it is miles ahead of the barter-internet sites in this one area. Miles ahead…

That brings me to my second point. A lot of people in the traditional barter exchange world think that a broker’s job is to ask one question, and then provide the answers. The question they ask is, “What can I get for you?” It’s a good question to ask. It’s a good starting point. It also makes for a really low performing exchange.

Asking what I can get for you is only the first step. It’s the job of any exchange owner to fill in the blanks for their clients, and I mean filling in the blanks that their clients don’t even know exist.

There’s something I have been saying for years, but apparently I need to say it louder>>>BARTER FEELS FREE <<< It’s not free, but it feels free. Barter costs you time and money, but it feels free. That’s why a good barter broker will take time to make suggestions to their clients, over and over and over again. Clients are more willing to try new things on barter, because it feels free. Even if the client never asked for those suggestions.

I remember one of the first experiences I had with barter. I was working for a business development company who owned a barter exchange that I later managed for them. They had set up a Friday relax/steam blow off afternoon and had invited three or four massage therapists to show up and give the staff a massage. I had never had a professional massage before, but that day I received, free of charge but on the bill of my employer, a massage. Our company didn’t pay cash for that, but got it all done on trade. And since that day I have been hooked. In fact, it’s been almost three weeks now and I should go get one…but I digress.

It is the duty and responsibility of a good broker to provide ideas and suggestions to clients daily. With technology being what it is and the ability to communicate with members in so many different ways with so little effort, there is no excuse for a barter exchange not to be, at very least, emailing its members.

The two things the industry needs to learn? How to make suggestions via software and via direct contact. It’s time for the barter world to step up its communication. Get to it guys! And if you are stuck and don’t know how to make technology work for your exchange, give me a call and I will help you update and create your suggestion systems.

I love internet marketing and do a number of projects in that realm on a regular basis. For the first time I found something that I think is a good idea for the barter industry. OneWorldBarter is the company that is doing it, and you can see it live at http://www.oneworldbarter.com/intro_barter_analysis.php.

The page takes you to a series of questions by which One World can market directly to you when you are done. Very well done. The only thing missing is an automated report at the end based on the questions. How about it developers?

When I started working for the United Business Exchange in 2000, I often wondered about the magnitude of trades I would see…would I see huge transactions? Would I see entire buildings traded? Would I see manufacturers trading huge amounts of freshly created goods? Would my clients barter for things like vacations to Europe?

Within a couple of months I realized that, yes, I would see all of this, and more. In honor of those old days when I was learning how to start my own barter exchange, I offer this list of the coolest trades I have seen. I have heard of many other bigger and perhaps cooler barters than these, but these are those that I have seen with my own eyes and participated in actively.

1. RV for Furniture – One of my clients called one day and wondered if I could do anything with an old RV that was sitting in his driveway. After taking a look at it, taking some pictures, and doing my broker magic, I was able to get him the equivalent of $8000 of goods and services that he wanted, including a trip to Disneyland and some furniture he had wanted for years.

2. First Class Tickets to Europe - My wife and I planned a trip to Italy at the end of summer in 2006. My partner owned a publishing company, and as a gift to me, did a direct trade with a first-class-only airline. Needless to say, my wife and I were very comfortable on our cross Atlantic flights.

3. Pool Tables for Warehousing - I mention this one because I was intimately involved in the deal. A client, who sold pool tables and gaming equipment, needed someone to handle logistics and shipping, incoming and outgoing, on a regular basis. From my network of contacts I was able to get him a fulfillment company who handled all of his incoming freight from China, repackaged equipment and sent it, all on trade. We made a number of our clients happy who wanted pool tables at the same time.

4. A 1/3 Acre Lot on a Golf Course – One of my real estate clients traded, free and clear, a 1/3 acre building lot on a golf course in Northern Utah. As I recall it was a $40,000 transaction.

5. A New Set of Dentures – A client who had suffered about his teeth for years went in to one of the dentists I traded with and got a whole new smile. His life changed entirely after getting those new teeth…

If you have ever thought about starting your own barter exchange, now is the time. Not only will you make a good living, but you’ll be living a life of service. Bartering opens the realm of possibility wide and lets ordinary people do extraordinary things. If you are wondering how to start a barter exchange, click the link at the top and find out.

In the last ten years I have participated in the start up of three different exchanges, one of which started from absolute zero. The first time I started a barter exchange, the exchange had somewhere around 25 members and no one was running it full time. I received very little training. The owners of the company didn’t think I needed it. I learned how to start a barter exchange by being thrown in the fire, so to speak. I learned pretty quickly what to do, and what not to do.

The second time I started a barter exchange I had already learned some of the basics and had some confidence, but I started with a regional company and they gave me a list of 200 members. After two weeks of intense calling, I dug up 40 that were willing to do some business with me if I could get something they wanted. It felt like starting over from nothing.

The third time, I started with absolutely nothing. This is where you, if you are considering starting an exchange, are most likely to start. This time, starting at zero, I had 40 members within the first couple of weeks. Sadly, I didn’t have the opportunity to see that exchange grow to maturity.

The point is this: if you want to learn how to start a barter exchange, just start one. Find some barter software like Barter 21 and set up shop. The barter industry is unregulated. It’s not difficult to get your foot in the door.  The cost of entry is less than $500. If you have a penchant for sales and marketing and enjoy long term business relationships, starting a barter exchange is something you might really enjoy.

If you want some free information about how to start your own barter exchange, click the link at the top and get our free program.

Now is the perfect time to start and run your own barter exchange… let me explain why.

1. Lines of Credit – What does this have to do with a barter exchange? To the bold barter exchange owner, his business of barter can assist businesses and individuals in ways banks and the community can’t, namely in giving interest free lines of credit. When is the last time you borrowed money from a bank that was willing to give you a permanent 0% interest rate on a credit line? Businesses still need financing for expansion, just like in boom times, but right now banks aren’t lending much and if they were, you’d still need amazing credit, an 800 FICO score, and referrals from the governor and your local senator to get a loan. In a barter exchange, you get to decide who does and does not qualify for a loan, and you get to see the improvement in business and celebrate along side a new loyal customer.
2. Take advantage of the down market – Sites like Craigslist and U-Exchange have seen a huge upswing in the number of postings in their barter sections. If you are the one to start a barter trade exchange, you are going to be entering a very undeveloped market. Doing direct trades on sites like Craigslist and U-Exchange are difficult. Using a barter exchange is easy. All businesses want to conquer new markets. With your help as their barter broker, you’ll guide them to make new sales and make purchases that will help them succeed.
3. Take advantage of the current interest in barter – Like I said before, cash is tight. Thousands of businesses are turning to any other system besides cash to be able to continue to do business. Your barter exchange, if you start one, can be a vehicle to attract the businesses that are looking for somewhere to barter, and there are thousands of them.
4. Take advantage of an under developed industry – Currently there are less than 500 barter exchanges in operation in the United States. Those exchanges are only doing business with less than 1% of the businesses in the US, combined. Clearly this is a growth industry. Your local area may have an exchange in it already, but they are probably only doing business with a couple of hundred businesses in the area, at most, so there is always room for more barter exchanges.

If you want more information about how you can start your own barter exchange, click the link at the top and get our free program.