Using Barter to Help Market

In last week’s marketing tip, we discussed how trading ad space within newsletter can be a smart (and inexpensive!) way to get yourself visibility on the ‘Net. To extend this concept beyond newsletters, this week let’s talk about bartering, one of the oldest forms of commerce.

What you can achieve through bartering is really only limited by your imagination and willingness. If you’re in business, whether it’s on or off the Web, the fact remains that you have some sort of product or service of value and that you will need others’ products or services to run your business. As an Internet marketing firm, our commodity is service, but our needs run from office supplies to web site hosting. If I can find partners willing to trade to satisfy our different needs, not only am I not expending cash, but I’m also broadening my reach of contacts who could help me in potential future endeavors.

So how to go about the process of bartering and how can you use it to help you market your web site? Sometimes barter begins with a need: you want something and rather than pay for it, first you’d like to try bartering. Of course, you’ll need to determine what you’re willing to give in exchange, and you’ll want to assign dollar values so you have something to measure what’s fair. If you want to try to negotiate the trade yourself, put together a list of potential suppliers and begin contacting them to see if they’re receptive to the idea of trade.

If you don’t want to go through that hassle, you might want to consider joining a barter exchange. There are barter exchanges set up in most communities all over the world, and basically they’re organizations of willing barterers run by a management concern that charges a small transaction fee for facilitating the deal.

Just as such organizations exist off-line, there are now online barter exchanges to help make connections — the advantage is, now your barter opportunities are worldwide! To get an idea of these online barter exchanges, here are a few you can visit:

Barter Trust
Bigvine
UBarter
Ebarter

Now, as to how you can use bartering to help market your web site, consider the following ideas:

1) Does your site need an overhaul? Contact a web designer about re-doing your site in exchange for your product or service.

2) Do you want to run a contest? See if you can get a company to provide you with the award in exchange for sponsorship exposure.

3) Are you in need of customized ad specialty items to help promote your url? Contact an ad specialty provider and see if they’re willing to barter.

4) Interested in doing a direct mail piece? Contact a printer to trade with.

5) How about conducting an email campaign? Contact web sites about emailing your marketing piece to their list if you agree to do likewise (be sure to include language in your email that explains the agreement between the two of you so as to best avoiding offending members of either list).

6) Besides the newsletter ad swapping we described last week (see our Tip archives), get extra exposure if web site publishers will barter with you for other kinds of exposure like banners, buttons, links, and even better…CONTENT!!

7) Running an in-house promotion for telemarketing/sales/ customer service employees? Barter with restaurants, movie theaters and entertainment complexes for gift certificates.

The list could go on and on. All you have to do is think of an idea and make it a reality!

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