Starting Barter Club in our town of 4,000- NEED your opinion!

[maf8009]

Starting Barter Club in our town of 4,000- NEED your opinion! PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL IDEAS! I NEED HELP HERE!

Please advise me... I am wrestling with the idea of starting a "country barter club" for ranchers and homesteaders in our town of about 4,000

We have a political "chamber of commerce" ie.... "click group or a whos whos club".... who will snub and completely destroy idea unless I join.... really they are decent people... just very very controling. If I join ($50) they will help promote the idea.... its in the bylaws.....

My reason for bartering is simple: because we all know the financial future looks very bleak for at least a while for the declining dollar, fewer jobs, money tight, neighbors need to get to know neighbors before any crisis" and I thinks some of us in town can "barter/swap" farm stuff/ tools, home canned goods, ranch supplies.... animals, feed and so on.....

We can barter things, and WORK too... so this club can maybe help a few out of work folks get what they need...

So my questions:

1) Do I charge FED dollars? $75 to join or let anyone "barter" join to pay fee?

2) People can list thier barter stuff for free on website- no fees to me for each listing.

3) I want to make friends in the community... but I NEED to make money too...

4) Is there a real NEED for this barter club locally? I know there are others, but this one caters to our local neighbors.. For many reasons trading local just makes sense.

5) Have a monthly "barter swap" event... BUT the "market day" on the town square may lose some of the vendors which will anger the chamber of commerce.....

So... this is my delima... Do I give this a go? what is my angle? I really WANT to help my neighbors (and have fun swapping too) But I do not want to fight town woo woos who will give me a lot of grief.

I am REALLY SCARED that if the dollar collapses (and it will in early 2011) how will our town survice without the barter group in place???

Lots of questions.. Please reply and let me know what you think? Thanks all.....

 

[lwheelr]

Ok... I think you need to approach it from a different direction.

If you NEED to make money, then you need to approach it with a business-like mindset, and think a bit more about the nature of the people you are targeting. You will need to market it far beyond any local groups (a local target market has a pool of only 4000 people, and a Chamber or other group will reach less than 10% of those).

Barterers DON'T LIKE TO PAY for anything that they can get for free. They can list something on Craigslist for free. Do a net search and see if there are barter sites with local indexes already up. If so, you'll never make a penny at it.

If there aren't, or if there are not any that serve your general region or state well, then you may have a niche.

You will also have to broaden your horizons. A town of 4000 people is not a big enough pool to get good bartering going on - not enough matches between the "I needs" and "I haves". So look at broadening it in a logical way - regional (County or geographical region), or even the entire state.

Then, you set up a website that does a couple of things:

1. Allows listings, with as much automation as possible, but which also allows moderation. Joomla, with SOBI2 would be good for this, you have excellent control, and can build your listing form any way you like.

2. Allow profiles, and PMs. Again, Joomla is a good base, with Community Builder for the profiles and PMs.

3. Earn from it without charging a signup fee. More on that in a bit.

Your revenue model is going to have to be different. For someone who is struggling (the very people who most need what you have), $75 is way too much. They MIGHT do $5, but frankly, if they can list what they have for barter free somewhere else, they just won't do even that. So you have two other choices:

1. Ad Revenue. Slap some Googles in there, and earn from Pay Per Click. I gotta warn you, this is now MUCH harder than it used to be, average earnings per click is literally ONE PENNY. Google has become very cheap for the publishers, and expensive for the advertisers since the corp. went public. If you can get a lot of traffic though, you can make some good money - this is best if you know that you can build a fairly popular site.

2. Enhanced listings. SOBI2 allows you to individually control the fields - you can say, "You can put in your item name, a short description (with a character limit), and your email address free, but you have to pay $1 to list your phone number, $1 to list a website URL, and $1 to upload a photo." If you keep those amounts tiny, then people will possibly do it. If you also are SMART about what you allow free (just enough for it to be effective), and about what you charge for (things that make it sell BETTER), then it can work, depending on the mentality of your target market.

A lot of it comes down to just what people will pay for, when they are of the mindset that they need to barter. So there is a third approach, but it is much more complicated...

Barter for membership.

In that case, you barter for things that can be easily eBayed. You'd have to set some standards, a minimum value, etc.

I am not sure that would be practical at all, but it is an option.

You will need to have a good marketing plan in place - ways that you can promote the site, and get the word out there. If you have any on-site swap meets in your area, attending them with a stack of business cards is a no-brainer way to get that word to part of your target market, but so is placing ads WITHIN other barter lists. You'd need to have business cards. You leave stacks of them at other places where your target market might be - and you can swap an ad for being able to leave those if you need to (a sidebar ad in the site, for being able to leave a stack of cards in a prominent place) - appropriate businesses would be feed stores, ranch supply, whole food stores, herb shops, craft shops, and other businesses who cater more to individual needs than mass shopping.

The last issue you need to tackle, is legal risk. If you set up a platform where people can barter, you MUST have a Terms of Service, AND a Privacy Policy. The Terms of Service must be written to minimize your risk - informing people that users are NOT screened, that they must investigate the validity of all trades, and institute their own methods of controlling risk, and that the website exists only to connect people who may be mutually beneficial to one another, but does not assume responsibility for the outcome of barters. You will also need to post a disclaimer at the bottom of every page, AND a notice at the top of every listing page instructing people to negotiate intelligently.

If you approach it wisely, there is some potential for it to work. But do your homework first - find out how much competition there is already - and plan things out well before you dive in.

If you'd like to brainstorm by phone, on a free call, just PM me and I'll be glad to talk to you about some of the technical or market aspects of it.

 

[maf8009]

Thank you for your insights... I feel the same... Craigs List has cornered this market and the Chamber of Commerce will squash my effoorts unless I play political games, which I wont do... My husband says just dont bother.... So I am off to other ideas for job searching..

I WISH our community would embrace barter... too many people are hooked on "fed dollars" and I feel altogether....

Craigs List is where I will barter when I need to. Thank YOU so much for your advice and input.

 

[Blackbird]

I agree.. If you change your mind and decide to do it and want to be successful, I believe it is always best to be accommodating to a whole. There are many great organizations, and so on.. even frames of thought that have religious or political overtones that are not needed when the subject is a common good that can apply to everyone. So many are put off by that, for good reason, so it might be better to rid yourself of any dogmas or potentially negative strings...

Good luck..

 

[lwheelr]

As to earning, you might look to farming to do that. There are things you can do even in a very small space that can be fairly lucrative.

 

[patandchickens]

Starting a barter club sounds like a good idea, particularly if you are so vigorously convinced for whatever reason that a total collapse of the dollar is imminent.

But I agree with others, doing it as a money-making thing seems really really unlikely to work... first, because the people who'd be interested are precisely the people who'd LEAST want to pay cash money for anything, secondly because your town is kinda small to generate any meaningful money for your immediate needs.

What about looking elsewhere for short-term cash-producing opportunities "until" the dollar collapses, but ALSO working on developing an informal bartering network, even just a website or something where people can list things for free? As a public service (which you yourself could also take advantage of, so it would not be 100% altruistic LOL).

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[lwheelr]

If you do decide to do a website, you could broaden the area, make it state or nationwide (with regional sub-areas in it), and put some Googles on it. Short term you would not make much, but long term, the income generated could be significant, IF there are not other large barter networks already in existence.

The thing is, a lot of people DO use Craigslist for barter. But a lot never think of it, and it doesn't work well for everybody because it is so regionally centered, and does not allow you to cross post in more than one area.

If you want to investigate that, I'd suggest two things:

1. Go do a net search for barter venues. See what is already out there and whether it is worth trying to break in.

2. Give me a call, and I'll talk to you about website options, and point you to some DIY resources so you can actually build the site.

It would not be fast income. But could, long term, be significant income if you do it right.

We usually advise startup candidates though, to look first to your own strengths and existing resources when needing income. There's usually more there than you realize (we've been doing business startup consulting for about 10 years).