World's Best-Kept Business Secret Revealed By Barte ews Blog

Twenty-seven years ago Barte
ews began covering the commercial barter industry, reporting on the three levels of barter—trade exchanges (for small to mid-size companies), corporate barter (corporations moving excess inventory for media) and countertrade (international offsets among the multi-nationals and countries).

Now, in addition to an extensive web site www.barternews.com, Barte
ews is introducing its new blog, www.barternewsblog.com, to give the deserved coverage of commercial barter...a proven business strategy.

Categories on the blog include (alphabetically): the Best & Brightest Barter, Entrepreneurs & Small Business, Industry News, Marketing/Purchasing/Financing, Media & Travel, Real Estate and Top Resources. In addition there will be an extensive Archives section.

Companies of every size and description, from the entrepreneurial startups to multi-national giants, are now acquiring needed goods and services through barter, corporate barter and countertrade.

Virtually anything your company pays cash for is a prime candidate for utilizing barter. Start by evaluating every product or service your company buys from the point of view of a barter opportunity.

Could you consider exchanging your company’s product or service as payment, or partial payment, to a supplier/vendor? This is direct barter, and involves an agreement between a buyer and seller that all or part of a bill will be paid through trade-in-kind rather than cash.

If you cannot come up with a good fit for direct barter, then explore indirect barter. It’s done through an entity called a trade exchange or barter company, where different businesses (usually locally) who are members of the barter company, will buy and sell to one another using a trade dollar. One way to determine what goods and services are available is to look at a trade exchange’s directory or web site.

“Barter, in its many forms, is one of the world’s best-kept business secrets,” asserts Bob Meyer, the founder and editor of Barte
ews. There are approximately 600 million small business & entrepreneurial companies worldwide, and yet the commercial barter industry has less than one-in-a-thousand of these companies as “clients” trading through the 800 global barter networks

The new Barte
ews blog has daily posts, informing and educating the business community on the way modern barter is conducted...which is light-years from the ancient way of doing barter on a one-to-one basis. This method of trading is sometimes referred to as “multi-lateral barter” because of the myriad trading possibilities when using a barter currency through an organized trading network.