The Edge Marketing

I don’t know if you have ever seriously considered bartering. If you haven’t considered it, it’s probably about time that you did. Why? Well, besides the fact that both parties involved in a barter leave feeling satisfied, it can also build lifelong personal or business connections. Building a network of contacts with other people not only increases the number of acquaintances and friends you have it also practically guarantees success.

It is well known fact that networking is a very important part of business whether it is done for finding more business deals or finding cheaper products or for enjoying exchanging goods and services without money or simply to build networks. Barter is one of the most overlooked business and personal tools available to you right now.

Now the question becomes, how to take advantage of the barter system for your own interests? The internet is the easiest way to take advantage of barter and set up your own group. Never before has the interconnectivity between individuals been so easy to achieve or maintain. In fact with resources available online you could set up your own barter group without even spending a dime!

OK, now to the steps to form your own barter group…

1. Determine what you want to barter. Appliances, services, books, everything?

2. Set up your group with the best free online resource for forming groups.

3. Advertise to get the word out.

1. In determining what to start a barter group for first look to your own interests and needs. What do YOU look for on the internet? What would you like to save money on? When you have a list you can go and do a search on overture to find out how many searches are done on that topic every month. This gives you an idea of how many others are interested. The link to go to do the searches is

http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

2. The best resource to set up a barter group for no cost is http://groups.yahoo.com/ .

You can choose the category you want your group in. Add explanation or summary of your expectations of the group and choose how you want to operate it. For example if you want to keep a strong hand on all postings to the group(recommended) then all emails sent to your group will have to pass through you. This way you can see all offers made and keep out Spam or offers that do not go with the policies of your group. If that is not a big deal then you can choose to leave your group open allowing anyone to post. Or a third choice can be to keep all members moderated (to start) till you are sure of their intentions and then switch them to ‘unmoderated’ status. The choice is yours and yahoo groups will provide you with the necessary infrastructure to set such a group up. To check it out just go to this link http://groups.yahoo.com/ and set up a test group, or the actual group if you know what it is you want.

3. Once you have decided what group to start and set up, you have to let people know where to go to take advantage of the opportunity you are officering. Taking part in discussion boards with your group in the signature of your email can lead to many interested people joining your group. Discussion and other email groups are a fantastic way of promoting your group without offending people with blatant advertising. Yahoo Groups is also a great place to look for groups you could take part in discussions with.

It may take a while to start up your own barter group or it may happen very quickly. It all depends on how many people are interested in that particular barter and how motivated you are in getting the word out. When started you can expect to save a ton of money and more importantly building lifelong connections with others.

Thank you for reading,

Syed A. Abedi

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