In my new book there is a chapter on the power and profits to be made through bartering and trade exchanges. I am a big advocate of becoming a member of a trade exchange, in particular Bartercard, as it gives you exposure to a completely different economy and a powerful way to increase your bottom line.
In the latest edition of Bartercard’s monthly magazine ‘B Savvy’, there is a great article on the use of trade dollars towards phone bills, focusing on M2 Barter Telecoms.
M2 Barter Telecoms is one of Bartercards largest members, and is the work of Troy and Adam Bowen, my partners in On Hold Advertising.
Check out the article here:
Google has released a new service called Google Base:
Google Base is a place where you can easily submit all types of online and offline content, which we’ll make searchable on Google (if your content isn’t online yet, we’ll put it there). You can describe any item you post with attributes, which will help people find it when they do related searches. In fact, based on your items’ relevance, users may find them in their results for searches on Froogle, Google Maps and even our main Google web search.
It looks interesting (plus anything Google touches seems to turn to gold), so I have just uploaded my book onto Google Base - How To Turn Your Million Dollar Idea Into a Reality At Google Base
Here is a picture of the Fake McDonald’s - this is the McDonald’s restuarant that is used in every commercial and movie you see. As the story goes this lonely and empty McDonalds is just waiting in the back of an industrial park near La Puente, California to be filmed. I also hear they have every single McDonald’s uniform in every size from every country in the basement - and all the different furniture too. For those of you how want to visit Ronald next time you are in California, this site offers direction.
So I received a letter the a few months back from my accountant offering ‘Tax Audit Protection’ - As you can see from the attached letter the investment would only cost $22 and protect me for upto $1100 worth of costs if I was audited. Not a bad insurance policy to take up at such a low price, I am sure a large number of this accountants clients took this offer up. For those of you who have read about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs - Safety (Security/Protection) is very very important to people and one of our core needs.
Lets look at it from the Accountants point of view - Firstly from an cost balance of view. They will need to sell 50 ‘policies’ for every audit they need to complete. I am not sure of the odds of people getting audited but I would almost bet it’s less then 1 in 50…. Obviously the Accountant can look back trough their records to see what % occurred in the past, to make sure the bases are covered.
Secondly, what are they really selling? Well unlike most services accountants offer - they are not selling time? Generally you pay the account for their time to complete a BAS statement, File a return etc etc. As the $22 is not covering a direct effort on the accountants behalf, it’s merely a opportunity/possibility. If the account sold 1000 of these to their large client base, that’s $22,000 of additional income they would otherwise wouldn’t have had.
How can you do the same in your business?
- An ‘All Purpose Tradesman’ could sell call-out protection; For $250 you are covered for 10 hours of work if/when needed in the next 12 months.
- An ‘Auto-Mechanic’ can offer a labour protection: If your car breaks-down in between scheduled services, $88 will cover the labour to fix the job.
