The_Business_Barter_Club_V1.1 by Nicola Cairncross

By Nicola Cairncross ÂŠ 2011 The Business Barter Club

Contents An Introduction To Bartering ....................................................................................3 The Benefits Of Bartering ..........................................................................................4 What Can Be Bartered & Who Can Barter? ............................................................... 4 But What If I Don’t Want What They Offer? ..............................................................5 How Do We Value Things? ........................................................................................5 What Are The Tax Implications? ................................................................................6 How Do I Get Started? ..............................................................................................7 Who Should I Talk To First? .......................................................................................7 How Long Should A Deal Last? ..................................................................................8 Hidden Opportunities Everywhere ............................................................................8 Who Would Make A Great Barterer? ........................................................................9 What’s The Business Barter Club? .............................................................................9 Case Study #1 – Kirsty .............................................................................................10 Recommended Further Reading: ............................................................................32

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Getting Started With Bartering

An Introduction To Bartering A centuries old business practice that has largely fallen out of favour in recent years is business bartering also known as business exchange. That’s a big shame because it’s one of the most exciting, fun and dynamic business opportunities around and you will be amazed what it can do for your business. Bartering is not about giving your local doctor a dead chicken for treating your kids chickenpox (although that WOULD be an elegant barter indeed!) although there are many non-commercial or domestic forms of bartering systems around the country. For a while, when I lived in Portobello Road, after I had my first baby, I got involved in the Portobello LETS scheme – part of a bigger UK-wide Local Enterprise Trading Scheme ** - which enabled me to get all sorts of lovely holistic treatments in return for my marketing advice. But it was a bit unwieldy and was very much geared towards the alternative market and I gradually forgot about it after I moved away. Barter can be as simple or as sophisticated as it needs to be, but it really essentially means that you don’t have to use your business’ cold hard cash to get what you want. If you offer a product or service, you can offer that product or service (usually at retail value) to get what YOUR business needs to grow and thrive. Here’s a great and very famous example: The owner of a small radio station in Florida was having difficulty meeting his bills. He gave some unsold advertising to a local store, who gave him 1400 can openers that weren’t selling and that the store owner was stuck with. The radio station owner sold those can openers - or “cash converted” them” – over the air over a period of a few weeks and made enough cash to pay his bills and, indeed, save the station from going under. Inspired by this early success, he approached other business owners locally, took their goods and services in exchange for radio advertising and started “on-air” auctions. In a very short space of time, the radio station was thriving and the owner realised he had a brand new business model. Eventually he expanded from a local concern to a national one and his sales now exceed $1 billion a year. Yes, we are talking about the Home Shopping Network.

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Exchange_Trading_Systems for more info

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The Benefits Of Bartering Bartering enables you to acquire more – often many times more – goods and service than you could ever otherwise afford and this means you can grow your business faster, while not over-extending yourself financially, always a risk in times of fast business growth. Additionally, because you can often offer your goods or services over a longer period of time, you are essentially buying future stuff (which will be more expensive) with your stuff today – this is like a form of extended credit, but one which is getting cheaper NOT more expensive. (Incidentally, this is why buying property on an interest-only mortgage used to be such a good idea but I can’t go into that here, ask me about it if you see me at an event!) Another benefit of bartering is that you get to build a great network of local, positive, open-minded, forward thinking business contacts and that can only benefit everyone. It’s a bit like an informal mastermind group! Another hidden advantage of bartering is that it gets your business name out and about in your community. Many businesses who take advantage of business bartering opportunities end up selling more, as the companies they deal with get used to working with them and often carry on long after the bartering deal has finished. I have bartered my time and expertise to my local Chamber of Trade & Commerce. In return for my advice and help with their blogging and social media, I’m getting my business name all over their website and positioned as an expert to their 500+ members. How much would that have cost in equivalent advertising and how effective would it have been without the expert positioning?

What Can Be Bartered & Who Can Barter? Whichever business, trade or profession you are in, you have the ability to generate products or services that cost you less than they cost to produce – otherwise you wouldn’t be in business because you would not be making a profit. You might make something that costs £100 to buy the raw materials, your time to make the thing costs up at £100 and then you sell it on for, say £300, making a profit of £100. ** Note: I’m going to do all the money in £££ because I’m from the UK, and typing $$ and Euros as alternatives is very tedious. But don’t worry, the principles work everywhere! Or you may sell an upmarket piece of furniture for £1500 which only cost you £500 to buy. After taking all your overhead into account, your profit on that sofa may be £800 for example. Another example may be where you have unsold inventory, as in the unsold airtime at the radio station mentioned above.

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I have unsold inventory right now, in my Business Marketing “All Done For You” service because I’m a fairly new business and I’ve not yet reached my optimum number of clients. So I have spare capacity right now and could trade my top-level services at retail value with another business with minimum cost to me, because what I’m charging for is my expertise and strategic planning skills, and I outsource the actual work to a trusted team based around the world, but who charge me much less than it would cost for me to do the work myself.

But What If I Don’t Want What They Offer? There is nothing to say that you have to do a straight trade. You can do a three-way trade, this is known as a “triangulated” trade. Let’s use the radio station again as an example. Actually this is very dear to my heart, this example, as I’m thinking about moving into both radio and print advertising for lead generation and I know that, in these difficult times, newspapers particularly are really struggling to sell all their advertising inventory. I want their airtime, but they may not want marketing advice or services. All I need to do is find out what the radio station really needs – perhaps ongoing catering for events at the station - and go and find someone who offers that and who may be open to the idea of trading. If the catering company could use my marketing services then all well and good. I supply those to the catering company, who supply the radio station, who give me the airtime. This would be a triangulated trade, but there is nothing to say that we couldn’t expand the trade even further.

How Do We Value Things? In the same way that you don’t have to do a straight company-to-company trade, you don’t have to do a straight value-to-value trade. As long as each party is happy with the value they are receiving from the trade, you are good to go! The thing that drives the value of your goods and services in a trade is pretty much the same as the elements that drive the value of it on the open market. Value is often driven by availability and desirability. And your value is not necessarily reflected by how successful your business is currently, as your marketing skills will be having an effect too. So you may have a very desirable product or service which is not readily available, but your business is not very successful yet. This could be because nobody knows about it – you are being a “best kept secret”. However, the person with whom you are negotiating a trade may very well want your product or service very much, but just not be in a position to pay for it right now. So don’t undervalue yourself!

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Sometimes, a product or service can be traded for several times what it is worth on the open market, due to two factors which are high desirability and the fact that the second business would have to lay out cold hard cash to acquire that product or service. If they don’t have the money, they might have to borrow it and that might have a high cost in itself. Compounded, that cost could mean that the item purchased would, over the years, have a much higher cost than retail. If a business has high profit goods, with a high desirability factor, and which are not readily available to the open market, then the value in barter could be several times the retail price. What are called “hard goods” (furniture, electrical equipment, cars, even apartments) are very easy to trade for several times the value of “soft goods” (advertising, personal and professional services, airtime). Examples of successful trades include trips, home maintenance, tuition, expertise, labour, holidays, hotel rooms, cars & vans, meals, apartment rentals and many, many more things. I myself have traded meals at my favourite restaurant The Pepper Tree in Worthing (two meals for two people per month with a bottle of house wine) for marketing coaching – this is how I met my friend and sometime business partner Steve Watson! I’ve also traded a fully functioning website for a month in a holiday home in Spain, while I built the website – well, I needed to be on the ground to take the glorious photos that would sell the rental in the future. I’ve traded PR services for a regular weekend away when I owned my boutique hotel The Acacia and I’m now trading PR services for regular marketing & internet coaching. If someone has a cost associated with providing you with the goods or services in a trade, there is nothing to say that you can’t pay the cash part and barter for the rest! Any clued up business person would jump at the chance to get full market value of goods and service they want and need, in return for cost value of the goods and services they are supplying, especially if they usually offer an “up front payment” discount too! Work it out for yourself, using your own business as an example.

What Are The Tax Implications? There are tax implications as traded goods or service do have a real value and you should discuss this with your accountant. As long as you keep good records and keep your accountant up to date with your trades, they should be able to advise you appropriately.

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How Do I Get Started? Make a list of everything you have to offer – goods, services, knowledge or skills - and don’t limit it to your business activities! You might be a demon seamstress or a great gardening expert for example. You might be a whiz at creating spreadsheets or making cupcakes or flower arranging while selling cars or antiques or widgets from your factory in your day job. You might have a driveway you don’t use that you could barter to someone paying a fortune to park their car for work. You might have a spare room that you don’t want to offer to a lodger but might be willing for someone to use as a home office. That unused bit of exercise equipment gathering dust in the garage might be good for a barter or you might have lost 3 stone over the last year and could coach someone how to do that too. Take a piece of paper and label it “Assets”. Divide it into four or five columns and label them SKILLS, KNOWLEDGE, PRODUCTS and SERVICES. And don’t’ forget the other assets in your family – incude the teenagers too, who might be willing to work somewhere on a Saturday in return for a benefit trade for you, where you could pay their salary and save yourself having to pay them pocketmoney any more! That one just came to me – total genius don’t you think? Have lots of fun brainstorming and see if you can fill the page. I think you might amaze yourself.

Who Should I Talk To First? As well as listing your offers with the Business Barter Club (see below) you should think about the most logical and straightforward barter prospects locally – you need to get some confidence with this bartering business in the early days so keep it nice and simple. If you like talking to people on the phone, and you have decided you want to barter some furniture for your office and you are in the commercial carpeting business, just sit down and call all the office furniture companies in your town. If you prefer email, use that instead. But find out who the owner of the company is as they are most likely to be able to make a positive decision and quickly too. Start by stressing that you are not after a “cheap deal” and you will get more attention. Retailers, in case you are not aware, work on a 100% - 300% markup and service providers have an ever higher profit margin, especially as most of them don’t factor in their time properly! Even though most businesses strive for big profits, they most often don’t achieve them, having to deeply discount to be competitive especially in more difficult economic circumstances. So when you come to a business owner, offering full retail value for your product or service in return for full retail value for theirs, they are going to be fairly receptive to your offer.

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How Long Should A Deal Last? You don’t have to use a barter deal immediately; there can be a delayed time frame. You might want their goods or services immediately but they might not need yours, so you need to offer a delayed completion time frame. In return for the use of your lease car now, with service thrown in, I’ll deliver marketing strategy, advice and actually do all the work over the next three years, perhaps. Or I’ll live in your newly finished first apartment, but help you with the marketing of the entire block when it’s finished and you are ready to sell the lot. You could let me have some radio airtime right now, but the hotel chain that I’ve organised to make rooms available to your visitors and staff, could allow that over the next 12 months. However, do set an expiration date on a deal, beyond which you wouldn’t want to deliver the service or goods, if you think that might be wise. You might also want to offer what’s called “assignability” where the beneficiary of any barter can pass that benefit onto someone else and you will honour the deal. This makes for even greater flexibility between all parties. What if someone has some stuff that they are willing to barter but also needs the money back out of the stuff they have bought or manufactured, so are unwilling to let the goods go for pure barter value? Offer your barter, and enable him to sell it on (assign) at a deep discount. That makes him look great to the purchaser, makes the barter partner some cash, and enables him to let his goods go to you, without losing any money in the deal at all. You are only limited by your own imagination in a bartering situation!

Hidden Opportunities Everywhere There is another opportunity hidden in plain sight here – the opportunity to become a Barter Broker, or a middleman. Essentially you become the local “go-to” person who fixes up, negotiates and seals the deals on local bartering while earning a % of the deal for your troubles, which is paid either in cash or in goods or services. Even if you don’t need the goods or services now, you can keep your credit note and barter or sell it on later! Talk about a business opportunity that won’t take any startup investment beyond some creativity, a business card and some balls! Wow, I’m almost tempted myself!

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Who Would Make A Great Barterer? Do you have someone in your family or team who hates selling but loves people? They might be great at bartering! Is there someone near to you who just loves car boot and garage sales? Try them on the bartering game and see how they get on. Perhaps it’s you?

What’s The Business Barter Club? ome on over to The Business Barter Club at http://BusinessBarterClub.com and subscribe for the Come incredibly low monthly membership and list your main asset there. (We are offering the first 100 people to join Founder Members status which means that your membership will be fixed at that level, for as long as you keep it current!) Your product, service, knowledge, skill or unused asset – also known as “your offer” fer” - will be entered into our database and circulated to our other members In our private, members only, ezine. You will also be able to list one of your “wants” so think about that too when you join. You will also be able to see what else is on offer that week and get in touch with the person making the offer. Over the next few weeks, your offer will be featured again and again, rotated in turn with our other member’s offers. In addition, we will be adding to and sorting our database daily, looking for matches and you will be alerted by email if we find one for you. As soon as you have made a successful barter, you might want to upgrade your membership so that you can offer more than one thing, or you might want to do that straight away. I hope you have enjoyed this report and I welcome your comments at http://BusinessBarterClub.com/blog Warm regards Nicola

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Case Studies Case Study #1 – Kirsty Nicola Cairncross:

It’s Nicola Cairncross here from the Business

Success Factory and the Business Barter Club. Today, I’m delighted to be interviewing Kirsty Cousins who’s actually one of my members of my private Facebook group.

When I was talking about the whole bartering thing she piped up and said, “I’ve done some bartering.” I asked Kirsty if she can be interviewed by me and she’s kindly agreed.

Welcome to the call Kirsty, I understand this is your first one.

Kirsty Cousins:

Actually it is, yes.

Nicola Cairncross:

Tell me a little bit about you, where’d you live?

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes. I’m Kirsty and I live in Derby, in the East Midlands. I’m married with two children, age 10 and 11. I’m a part time English teacher and for the other part of my time I’m starting my marketing company.

Nicola Cairncross:

Good. What attracted you to the whole marketing thing from being an English teacher?

Kirsty Cousins:

The whole creativity sides of it. They have to design something thinking strategically. I think if I started again in years ago, our computers and all sorts of stuff. I would’ve started it up with graphics and I have gotten to

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marketing I think.

So for me it’s the time to reinvent myself and do something completely new, completely different that which pace to creativity and strategic thinking.

Nicola Cairncross:

Once you realised you wanted to do something different, how did you go about researching that, or you just sort of wondering about and you found something that intrigued you?

Kirsty Cousins:

I was wondering that in the dark a little bit, I was doing a little up online, started about the old stuff, started talking to a lot of people, started just looking at the whole online marketing thing. The thing that really held me back is that I don’t have that much experience, so I was looking for when to get experience.

Nicola Cairncross:

Do you need marketing experience or internet marketing experience?

Kirsty Cousins:

Both really.

Nicola Cairncross:

What did you do next?

Kirsty Cousins:

I was trying to do some pieces for friends but I saw an opportunity because I was doing a lot of dog training at the time with the puppy. I was getting a new puppy and it was all getting a bit expensive.

My husband was starting to sort of raise his eyebrows of the cost of it. I really wanted to carry on and I’ll literally sent this dog trainer’s website, and it was pretty cool even I could see that.

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This English teacher I could see that there was full of punctuation and grammar mistakes. I could see an opportunity for me to offer them something and maybe get some free dog training in return and that’s how it started really.

Nicola Cairncross:

How did you approach them initially?

Kirsty Cousins:

I just asked for a meeting then I’ve got to know them pretty well by then, not so well, but well enough to ask for a meeting.

Nicola Cairncross:

Can you get more specific for me for the benefit of the people listening. What did you say when you asked for the meeting? Did you let them know in advance what it was going to be about or did you just say “I think I can help you” or there’s something that mutually beneficial? What did you say

Kirsty Cousins:

Nothing that sophisticated really. I just said, “I’ve got an idea, come with me, can we talk about it?” I’ve given them few ideas before about dog training classes and the whole teaching side of it just cough at the end of lessons kind of thing.

They kind of knew I was an ideas-person and some of my ideas had worked for them before, I think that [inaudible 00:03:24] on that basis.

Nicola Cairncross:

Cool. So you went onto a meeting and were you nervous or you talked quite confident, how did you feel?

Kirsty Cousins:

I didn’t know how to take it, I thought that they didn’t often not want to know at all because I knew that I could offer them help with the punctuation and I was

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pretty confident.

Now I wasn’t as confident in being able to offer them anything more that they would really want or whether they would know that they needed the help, whether they see that their website didn’t need a little building up. I was a bit nervous and it went well actually.

Nicola Cairncross:

So you went in, you sat down, you had your coffee, and so how did you lead off with the conversation? I think a lot of people listening to this would love to do this kind of thing, but I just really did step by step on how, what to say at what point. So in the fact you’ve successfully negotiated the barter deal is very interesting to us all in fact.

Kirsty Cousins:

Step by step, I went in and I said, “Let’s see your website, fantastic website.” I talked about all the things I liked about their website and then I said, “Did you realise that there are quite a few punctuation mistakes throughout” which they are quite surprise to hear actually and I have printed off quite a few of their pages and done teaching a bit and concentrated on the punctuations.

Nicola Cairncross:

That’s really good that you showed them all the places where it was right.

Kirsty Cousins:

I just showed them and they were quite horrified really. So when they said, “What can we do about it?” I said, “Well, I got few ideas and by the way it was all kind white and black and quite dark.”

Nicola Cairncross:

That’s not good. Nobody can read that.

Kirsty Cousins:

No. I started talking about that as well and about the pictures being a little bit jumbled up, having already said they we’re fantastic pictures but a bit jumbled

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up actually, have you thought having a monthly newsletter and have you thought about doing this and that and the other which they hadn’t.

So,

immediately they were quite interested.

Nicola Cairncross:

It’s really important actually if anyone who is listening, who is thinking about doing local marketing? It’s quite a scary thing, but when you get talking to most business owners you realise how little they actually know about how to market themselves effectively online.

So if you even know things like mailing lists and ezines then you’re several steps ahead of the game, aren’t you?

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes.

I only was a few steps ahead, I really was because I knew what

research had done sort of that month, but I was further ahead and I think that’s maybe one.

Nicola Cairncross:

Who had written their copy for their website? Presumably not them.

Kirsty Cousins:

They’ve done some of it in conjunction with a web designer.

Nicola Cairncross:

For the people listening, some people will say, “What does it matter if a website has got bad, spelling grammar or punctuation?” I’m a writer and I write informally but I generally tend to punctuate I think well enough.

From a person looking at their website as a potential where you already were a customer, weren’t you? What impressions did it give you the fact that their website…

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Kirsty Cousins:

It turned me off, it did turn me off. I went to them and became their customer because I liked what they were doing and I could see through enough to see that, but it did turned me off and there’s has been website and so I’ve just thought, “Well, that’s not professional to get their apostrophe’s in the right place.”

Nicola Cairncross:

I totally agree with you. You don’t need to be 100% Queen’s English but definitely it conveys unprofessionalism if you can’t get your website to be right.

Kirsty Cousins:

Absolutely.

Nicola Cairncross:

You’ve demonstrate, you we’re nice, you went in and you told them the good things about the website, you demonstrated all these things that they could be doing better. Presumably they have access to their website and they surf.

Kirsty Cousins:

No they didn’t. Every time they wanted anything to be changed they were paying 15 pounds to their designer. So if they were selling a dog for example, they will pay 15 pounds to the designer to put it on the website, dog was sold.

The next day they will pay 15 pounds to take it off the website.

immediately you can see that a) they’re being ripped off and b) there’s an awful lot of better way to do it than that.

Nicola Cairncross:

What did you suggest to them?

Kirsty Cousins:

I suggested getting a website that they could maintain to use for themselves and I could help them to maintain. At which point I kind of like got an awful lot of other ideas as well which was like, “Yes, we could do that.” It turned into

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quite a positive meeting, but I did end up over promising.

Nicola Cairncross:

So how did you approach the barter subject?

Kirsty Cousins:

I just said, “Well, you know I’m willing to help you with this, but I do need some dog training, it’s getting expensive, would you be willing to give me some free dog training and advise because I want to go into dog breeding” and all about that. It’s just kind of like teaching in the areas that I want to know about and we can make this work for both of us.

Nicola Cairncross:

So it was a straight barter deal and that, “I’m going to do all your website stuff, you’re going to give me dog training whenever I need it and advise about the dog breeding.” You didn’t need to cost up your time or anything?

Kirsty Cousins:

No. I think last night is being a mistake, but a whole relationship’s developed. I’ve done loads more than I’ve initially said but then because we’re friends we’ve stopped counting, with anybody else I would cost up 100%.

Nicola Cairncross:

Yes absolutely, you got a better idea in there, how long things take you to doing stuff?

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes. I didn’t realise how many hours I put in to it because originally I was going to rewrite their current website, but once we got talking it was clear that they needed a whole new website which I didn’t actually build but I wrote much to the company, did the photography and put a lot into it.

Nicola Cairncross:

Would you say on balance has been a good deal for you?

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Kirsty Cousins:

I would say in my current position that it has, yes, but I wouldn’t do it again because as well as the dog training I’ve gained an awful lot of experience in marketing.

I’ve been able to try things out with people who are willing to sort of give me free reign with their business I mean that would be incredibly gracious with what they’ve let me try.

I’ve learned, my learning curve has been really steep but it’s been really valuable and I’ve also got portfolio and stuff that I can say to each customers, “Look, I’ve done this and this is what the results that I’ve got,” and they’ve got huge links into the whole world, the whole niche that I want to get into, so it’s been valuable for that as well.

Nicola Cairncross:

Cool.

For my local business marketing clients who probably would be

listening to this, I meant to people who wanted to do local business marketing as I’m doing in Worthing and Brighton area.

Would you say that going from someone who wanted to get into this from someone who’s now got a client that they can point to and say, “I worked on these people’s site and this is what it looked like before, and this is what it looks like now, and these are the results they’re getting.” Is that giving you a lot more confidence to talk about the local businesses?

Kirsty Cousins:

Definitely, yes.

Nicola Cairncross:

Good. If you’re going to barter your services again, what would you like to barter for?

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Kirsty Cousins:

That’s a good question. I don’t know, I‘m going to need technical help in setting up my business and lots of advise, so initially that I suppose.

Nicola Cairncross:

What do you mean technical help particularly?

Kirsty Cousins:

Installing blogs as I’ve started to setup websites myself and build them myself, how technical installation and getting templates and all that sort of stuff.

Nicola Cairncross:

Alright. We can certainly help you with that because you’re in the group and everything now and I’m going to help you today. So, how did you do their then website if you don’t know how to do it just yet?

Kirsty Cousins:

Well, let’s just say I got somebody else to actually do the technical building side of it and he built it on a Joomla Platform and I wrote the copy because he’s a friend.

I was working with him, watching what he was doing and

building it, so I was learning from him as he built it although he was the one who got paid. Then I do a lot of maintenance of it.

Nicola Cairncross:

So you’re quite familiar with Joomla now and now you want to learn more about Joomla really because we’re going to teach you WordPress today, aren’t we? So technical help, what else did you say?

Kirsty Cousins:

What else do I need? What else do I offer?

Nicola Cairncross:

No. What else do you need?

Kirsty Cousins:

Advise with whole search engine optimization and I’ll talk to you later about

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domain names and that sort of stuff. It’s just hard to get going what to do first in order to do everything in. I’ve got lots of ideas but I need to put it in some sort of structure and work out with the best way in doing all this.

Nicola Cairncross:

I’ve got a couple of recommendations for you. One is to look at obviously upgrading your membership with us because we’ve got step by step system, we could teach you.

The other thing is, the business barter club that I just launched, the first sign up is offering search engine optimization as a barter in return for article writing.

Kirsty Cousins:

Right.

Nicola Cairncross:

Marriage made in heaven straight away. He wants press releases writing and articles, unique articles for his site, so you really do need to join the barter club then we can hook you up.

Kirsty Cousins:

That’s good. I do want to learn to do it myself.

Nicola Cairncross:

Absolutely. You could make that a condition with the barter, couldn’t you? That he gets you going quickly, but then he teaches you what to do for yourself.

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes.

Nicola Cairncross:

The second recommendation I’ve got for you is one of my mentors, an American, Rich Schefren who I don’t know if you’ve come across yet. You

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need to get some of his reports.

He’s just released a report on getting traffic which is awesome because it not only tells you how to get the best kind of traffic, it tells you how to work out what the best kind of traffic is for you and your business and how to work out what traffics converting.

Just reading the report exposed to me that I’ve got a massive hole in my business still. The first report I have read of his exposed that to me as well. So every time he brings out a report I have this massive realisation that I’ve got lot more of work to do.

So go on and do a search for Rich Schefren.

The Internet Marketing

Manifesto was his first report and then the second one was the Missing Chapter and the third one was the Final Chapter and actually I need to get a link up on my site to all that.

I’ll

tell

you

where

you

can

find

the

link

straight

away,

NicolaCairncross.com/resources. There’s a set of little square buttons and in the bottom row of those buttons there is the – attention, I think there’s the Internet Marketing Manifesto, it’s all brightly coloured, it’s got pink and yellow in it, so you can’t miss it.

It’s just the most amazing set of reports about how to build an internet orientated business. Like I said, he just brought out this traffic report which is just awesome.

Kirsty Cousins:

That sounds good.

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Nicola Cairncross:

If you find Rich Schefren on Facebook, he also does a daily video. They watched the most recent one first, go to the begging of his page wall, he’s done about 20 videos so far. If you watch those in order, he’ll really teach you a lot about building a business.

Kirsty Cousins:

Brilliant.

Nicola Cairncross:

Very cool.

Kirsty Cousins:

That will be useful because I’ve got their website to number two into Google rankings but we’ve got one competitor that I just can’t seem to beat and I’m determined to get to the top.

Nicola Cairncross:

What keyword are they coming for?

Kirsty Cousins:

Dog Training Derbyshire.

Nicola Cairncross:

That’s pretty nice and a three word phrase which is nice, isn’t it? When you do a search in Google, did you know that you can change your own location? So at the moment if I looked down the left-hand side, it’s saying, “Brighton, UK” and it’s saying, “change locations.” I’m going to change one location now to Derbyshire. My Google will think I’m in Derbyshire and it will show me the results.

Kirsty Cousins:

Oh okay.

Nicola Cairncross:

So I’m putting Dog Training Derbyshire and I’m actually seeing the Google places pages coming up first.

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

Kirsty Cousins:

Right.

Nicola Cairncross:

Now, this is going to change all the time. Sometimes Google is going to show me the organic search results with the page, Google AdWords results at the top. Those are the ones on pile yellow background, but I’m seeing Chris Briggs Dog Trainer number one, Dog Training Derbyshire, number two, the dog-father.

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes.

Nicola Cairncross:

Right? I’ll tell you how you can jump up to number one straight away. If you click through to the place page and not the actual website, you’ll see at the top there’s a few little links, one says print, one says send and one says link.

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes.

Nicola Cairncross:

If you click on the send one, you’ll get the opportunity to e-mail the maps link, it’s Google maps, Google places, they’re one on the same now. You could email that to your customer and say in the subject line, “mail this out to your best customers” and in the message line say, “We’d really appreciate it if you would come and review all Google places page, here’s the link to it, all you need to do is click on the stars” where it says your rating and write a little review.

Offer some incentive for them to do that, I don’t know what your client could offer them but 10% off on your next dog training lesson or something. Offer some incentive and as soon as you start getting reviews on that Google places page, you’ll jump to number one and stay there.

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

Kirsty Cousins:

Brilliant. Thank you. I could put it on our Facebook page and our newsletter as well, couldn’t I?

Nicola Cairncross:

Yes you could.

Kirsty Cousins:

Fantastic.

Nicola Cairncross:

That’s the way to do it, you have to actually send them the link and tell them what to do and give them an incentive to do it. I jumped to number one for business marketing in Brighton when I did that.

I got something like 17

reviews in one day. I just sent it out to my mailing list obviously.

Kirsty Cousins:

Fantastic.

Nicola Cairncross:

Yes. There you go, that’s a tip for you, so let’s sort of look at their website.

Kirsty Cousins:

I’m getting nervous now.

Nicola Cairncross:

It’s alright don’t worry. I'll do exactly what you did. I'm looking at your page title which is in the blue bar at the right top of my browser and I can see you've got your title of the website is, “Dog Training, Derbyshire.” What you need to put in there is, “Dog Training, Dog Training Derbyshire,” and that should do it.

I'm looking now at your page source just to see what your metatext are. You've got, “Dog Training Derbyshire, Dog Training, Puppy Training Classes, Residential Training, Dog Father, etc.

You need to make sure that your

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keywords are not more than 70 characters long including the spaces. It's got quite tight now.

You can have again your title where you've got, “Dog Training, Derbyshire” you need, “Dog Training, Dog Training Derbyshire” and that should be less than 70 characters but check that.

Now with your description of your content that’s the bit that shows on Google when someone does a search, it's like a little description bit that shows onto the link in Google. You've done quite well there but you've got your keywords first which I wouldn't recommend.

What I would have is a live link to the website starting HTTP. The live link to the website then the phone number then the name of the company and then some call to action some reason for people to click through and visit the website, some benefit, incentive coupon offer.

Use it like an advert and make the call to action very strong in the description in your metatext. I think all those things will make a bit of a difference.

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes. That would be good.

Nicola Cairncross:

Good stuff! Nice website though, you know what would you want to see on a dog training site, you want to see pictures of dogs and you've got that, so that's very good. You've got newsletter sign-up at the top right that's perfect because it's real estate.

Kirsty Cousins:

Can I have an incentive for that? I think it would need an incentive.

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

Nicola Cairncross:

Yes. It's not strong enough. The other thing is that you need a benefit like, “What will I get if I sign up to the newsletter? What would I immediately get?” It could be a report it could be the top 10 puppy training tips, it could be a discount or some kind, but it needs to be a bit stronger.

Now the other thing we're finding now is the embedded newsletter sign up box which is on the sidebar. It used to work brilliantly but now they are getting less and less effective.

So you might want to look at a light box pop-up on this page, because you know the ones where it all goes slightly dark and they’re really nice big popup comes out and it's got a really nice graphic picture of the report or something.

Popup Domination by Michael Dunlop, he does a pop-up for WordPress websites and he also does a pop-up for standalone websites like Joomla.

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Popup domination?

If you again go to NicolaCairncross.com/resources, you'll see an Ad on that page from popup domination.

Once you sign-up and buy, it’s something

about $47, you’ll get the option to download the WordPress version or the standalone version and that's the one you want for Joomla.

I've gotten a decline just doing installing a popup domination on their Joomla site so I know it works. It's totally customizable you can say that it only comes enough to say 30 seconds on looking around the site.

You can specify which pages it appears on. You can only show once every

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seven days to new visitors and all that stuff. We found in our testing that it quadruples the amount of sign-ups to your mailing lists.

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Excellent.

As we all know every sign-up to your mailing list is a hot lead, it's a customer waiting. So all of these are useful for you and for your other clients, isn't it?

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Absolutely yes, fantastic.

So you need a website for yourself to be able to attract other clients because of course that's the first thing they're going to look forward to see that you're working it all, don’t they?

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes.

Nicola Cairncross:

So coming back to bartering, you want SEO services, you want technical advise, what else would you like more locally?

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

More locally?

Yes. Do you have a favourite restaurant? Would you like to eat in regularly? Do you go to a hairdresser where you’d like free haircuts and hair colours?

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes I would love free haircuts.

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Nicola Cairncross:

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Have you downloaded my report yet on...

Not yet.

You could do that at the BusinessBarterClub.com because I've written a whole report now about all the different kinds of bartering and of course you can do – I call it triangulated bartering which is where for example if you went to a restaurant and tried to barter your services, they might not want your services but they might want dog training, so you could do a three way barter.

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

What are the tax advantages to this bartering thing?

Well there are tax implications, anything you barter does have a value. So in effect you’re supposed to declare the value you get. So for example I have a dog training, that's like earning money if you like. I would say officially on this call everybody get advice from your own accountant about these.

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Right.

You need to make sure you’re complying with everything.

Yes.

Good. So think about what else you'd like locally, that way you could offer internet marketing services. The other benefit of doing that – well, apart from the fact that you get loads of lovely free stuff. It will give you more clients into portfolio.

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Which is great, yes.

I’ve done exactly the same thing for my local Chamber of Commerce because I figure if I can get in front of 500 chamber members as the local expert from business marketing then that will be a good thing.

So are you thinking now for next time that you would have some sort of written agreement where you both set out what you're offering and what the value of that is and everything?

Kirsty Cousins:

A written agreement, cost it out, make clear timeframes as well so that it didn't continue sort of adding if I didn’t want it too. I’m really happy with it this time, because it's the stuff that I love doing. Next time I will certainly make sure that it was much tighter guidelines and much clear is I can expect.

Nicola Cairncross:

Also you could have renegotiation points, can’t you? So, if for example it was a one-year agreement, you could have renegotiation points at two to three months stage and six month stage and the nine month stage so both parties feel they're getting good value out of the barter.

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes I think that is quite important because sometimes I do feel like I’m putting hours and hours into this and is it really worth it, but some are bad days, some are good days, I just love doing it and its fine.

Nicola Cairncross:

So when would be a natural renegotiation point for you? How long have you been doing this for?

Kirsty Cousins:

Ten months.

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

Nicola Cairncross:

So 12 months would be a good point, wouldn’t it? You could write to them in a nice sort of friendly but business-like way and say, “You know we've been running this agreement for nearly a year now, do you mind setting up a meeting so we can talk about how it’s going and what we want to do going forward?”

Kirsty Cousins:

Yes I could do, but I am enjoying what I’m doing very much and I know that it probably wouldn't continue quite the same if I did that as of the moment I’m making videos for them and I’ve never made videos before, so I’m having a lot of fun doing that.

It’s not something that I think they would invest in but they will be into dog training for, so I guess we might just leave.

Nicola Cairncross:

No absolutely, I’m not suggesting you'd bring the barter arrangement to a close.

The other thing about bartering is – are you still using dog training in

return?

Kirsty Cousins:

Well, I'm teaching the dog training now.

Nicola Cairncross:

So you’re getting paid for that then?

Kirsty Cousins:

No but I’m getting mentored so I can get a professional qualification which I think it would do me good or else I would be working.

Nicola Cairncross:

Well, you know sit down and write out all the benefits are you getting from this and what they’re worth to you? Set yourself right and workout littlie, keep a track over a month what you’re investing in your time and what that’s worth.

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

I think it's very important to get clarity around this because like you said I mean obviously you’re not feeling them because you’re enjoying what you’re doing but some people might get feelings of resentment if they feel that the barter is unequal.

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Yes I can see that that could come in very easily.

By sitting down and getting real clarity about it, writing things out helps get things out my head into a place where I can look at them objectively. So you’ve got a link down the bottom – yes, you have got a link down the bottom, site created by Kenneth Creations, is that you or your mate?

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

No, that’s the friend who put it up.

As soon as your site goes live, we’ll need to change that to, “Site created by Kenneth Creation for your business.”

Kirsty Cousins:

It’s my business going on all the videos and everything else on YouTube.

Nicola Cairncross:

The YouTube channel is all about dog training, isn’t it?

Kirsty Cousins:

I need to talk to you about YouTube channel because at the moment – well, I’ll talk to you about it another time, but at the moment it’s my marketing company not the dog training marketing company.

Nicola Cairncross:

YouTube is very powerful and everyone loves videos of dogs. Did you see that video, the dog going around where he was talking about the bacon in the

http://BusinessBarterClub.com

fridge?

Kirsty Cousins:

Nicola Cairncross:

Classic, brilliant, yes.

We all love that so much. My sister’s been in Luxembourg for three weeks and every single member of the company she’s been with absolutely loved that. She got off the train yesterday from Luxembourg and she was doing expressions of the dog, it was so funny.

I really want to thank you for your time today Kristy I know it was nerve wrecking for you, your first ever interview, It wasn’t so bad was it?

Kirsty Cousins:

No, it wasn’t so bad. I might do that again.

Nicola Cairncross:

Obviously we’re going to talk afterwards, but I’d love to interview you again when you perhaps move down the road a bit more. Got some more barters under your bell or perhaps even got some more local business clients under your bell, because I’d love to interview you about that as well.

Kirsty Cousins:

Brilliant.

Nicola Cairncross:

Okay. Thank you very much for your time.

Kirsty Cousins:

Thank you.

Nicola Cairncross:

Bye.

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- END -

Recommended Further Reading: Getting Everything You Can Out of All - Paperback (Apr. 26, 2001) by Jay Abraham The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth InTough Economic Times by Jay Abraham (May 26, 2009) The Art of Barter: How to Trade for Almost Anything by Karen Hoffman and Shera Dalin (Apr 21, 2010) The Complete Idiot's Guide to Barter and Trade Exchanges by Jerry Howell and Tom Chmielewski (Dec 1, 2009) Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender by Thomas H. Greco (Nov 1, 2001) Barter Systems: A Business Guide for Trade Exchanges : A New Way to Offset Start-Up Expenses, Reduce Inventories, Conserve Cash Flow, and Open New M by Roger Langrick (Oct 1994) The End of Money and the Future of Civilization by Thomas H. Greco (Jun 4, 2009)

ÂŠ 2011 Nicola Cairncross

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