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The Tuesday Report

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January 18, 2005

Written by Bob Meyer, Editor of BarterNews

We Want You To Know...When you sign up to receive the FREE weekly Tuesday Report announcement your e-mail address will never be sold, traded, or given to another party.


Michael Jordan Does It Again

Trading on his name and basketball fame has made Michael Jordan a very rich man. Past endeavors include stock from Nike and Oakley in exchange for endorsements, plus financial backers of his restaurant in Chicago provided Jordan with 10% of the gross for using of his name, jersey’s, basketballs, et cetera in the restaurant.

Jordan’s latest effort sees the former basketball superstar becoming a partner in the $600 million, 825-unit Aqua Blue Hotel & Resort in Las Vegas. The property will include the 65,000-square-foot Michael Jordan Athletic Center with two basketball courts, a tennis court, a running track, aerobics rooms and two Jordan restaurants.


BarterNews issue #63 is now available... get your copy now! Orders are shipped within two business days. Click on Order Form.

(If you are not sure if your subscription has lapsed, e-mail your name, address, and zip code to bmeyer@barternews.com.)


Trump Packs Them In...Will Earn $1 Million An Hour For Advice

When Donald Trump, CEO of Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts and star of the reality-based TV show The Apprentice, talks, people want to listen. According to New York-based Learning Annex, Trump is a big draw—the biggest in the world now.

Steve Schragis, a Learning Annex director, announced that when Trump spoke at a wealth-building conference in 2004 over 20,000 people attended. And that’s why the Learning Annex has signed Trump to conduct three one-hour classes this year on building wealth through real estate, for a fee of $1 million per appearance. Trump will speak in Los Angeles on May 1, New York on October 23, and Chicago on November 6.


Every barter company in the world is listed on our web site, click through to our Global List of Barter Companies.


Happenings In The Trade Exchange Industry....

  • Lois Dale, founder of Barter Advantage in New York City, and newly-elected President of the International Reciprocal Trade Association (IRTA), was one of 100 women business leaders who met at Georgetown University in Washington (DC) in early December for the Riga Women Business Leaders Summit. It was the second meeting for the group, with the Summit commencing in Riga, Latvia, this past September which Ms. Dale also attended.

    The Riga Summit is supported by a public/private partnership including the U.S. State Dept., the White House, the U.S. Embassy of Latvia, the President and government of Latvia, and several private corporations.

    “I was tremendously impressed with the Summit and the wonderful women I met,” Dale exclaimed. “It was great networking with women business owners from around the world and comparing notes on our similar business issues.”
  • BizXchange, a Seattle-based trade exchange, announced that it saved local businesses $10.9 million in cash in 2004 while generating over $10 million in new sales for their 1,000 clients. In December, the company conducted $2.2 million in total trade transactions (sales & purchases), and over the year extended more than $4 million in credit lines to Washington and California clients. For more information on BizXchange visit: www.bizxchange.com.
  • International Monetary Systems (OTCBB:INLM) has hired barter industry veteran Georgia De Grant to manage its Southern California office, located in Long Beach. Ms. De Grant has worked in the industry for 18 years. Her experience includes that of reciprocal trade manager for NCE of St. Louis for 16 years, and shouldering similar responsibilities for BXI of Los Angeles.

“What we have here is a failure to communicate!”

Years ago, one of the most visible people in the barter industry said the #1 reason why the industry wasn’t farther along in its development was due to a “failure to communicate” by those in the business.

This realization was the genesis of The Competitive Edge newsletter, now into its 18th year of publication. Trade exchange owners who use this powerful marketing and promotional tool are never guilty of “failing to communicate.”

As the owner of a trade exchange you must stay in front of your clients. Informing, educating, and inspiring them, because your clients’ bartering is a relatively small percentage of their overall business. So if you don’t keep their interest and enthusiasm for trade at a high level, you lose.

Your primary aim, like all other businesses, is to get your clients coming back for more. Every extraordinary business (and every trade exchange owner who wants to be extraordinary) knows that the customer you have, is a lot less expensive to sell than the customer you don’t yet have!

Want to take your exchange to a higher level? Use The Competitive Edge newsletter in your operation—it “sells” the many benefits of working through your trade exchange like nothing else!

To learn more about The Competitive Edge newsletter and how it can help build your trade exchange, click here.


From The 1996 BarterNews Archives...

Cable TV’s Hot Property Astutely Barters Inventory

Lee Masters, 43-year-old former general manager of MTV, is the man who developed the E! channel. And barter played a major role in turning this cable property into a hot commodity.

Masters says Americans love film celebrities, and film celebrities need exposure under circumstances that they can control. So he took advantage of this situation.

His first move was to introduce star-studded talk shows, and entertainment “news” (controlled publicity) through Talk Soup which showed highlights from the daytime network talk shows—Jerry Springer and Richard Bey, among others.

The talk shows provide E! the clips in exchange for mentioning what oddity the next day’s show will feature.

Masters also barters his own material. Every day eight E! crews scurry around Hollywood recording interviews, movie shoots, premieres and award shows for their daily 30-minute E! newscast. (It’s aired three more times during the day as well.)

Then he barters the content to NBC which uses the footage during the low-viewership early morning hours. In return E! gets use of videotape shots by NBC news crews.

Masters also moves his shows to the airlines for in-flight viewing. And he edits various shows into another half-hour format which he trades to affiliated cable operators to persuade them to carry E! on a lower channel. Seems the lower the number on the dial, the greater the odds are that the “channel surfers” will see E!


Get New Money-Making Ideas And Valuable Contacts!

You can obtain useful, informative ideas and contacts in every available back-issue of BarterNews.


U.S. Ranks No. 1 For Stable Real Estate Investments

A survey by the Association of Foreign Investors in Real Estate, a Washington-based association of international real-estate investors representing 17 countries, shows these investors plan a shift of money into buildings in Japan, Eastern Europe and Australia.

The survey found that the U.S. continued to rank as the No. 1 country for stable and secure real-estate investments because of the transparency, openness, and liquidity of the marketplace, as well as its huge size.

But high prices for U.S. real estate are leading investors outside the nation, causing the percentage of their U.S. real-estate acquisitions to make an expected drop from 71% in 2004 to 55% in 2005.


Give A Gift To A Friend Or Associate. If you know someone who might benefit from this newsletter, feel free to forward it to them! (See the “box” at the end of the newsletter for the forwarding service.)


Here & There...

  • It’s too early to gauge the effect of the horrific tsunami in Asia, but it isn’t hard to predict that travel to the Caribbean will fall off this year during the hurricane season (August to October). But the availability of accommodations on trade for courageous vacationers should be ample.
  • What’s the value of networking? Among venture capitalists relationships are extremely important. Virtually no professional investors will take a chance on a company or entrepreneur that has not been introduced by a trusted colleague or adviser.
  • According to the Nilson Report, a newsletter that tracks the credit card industry and the payments business, there are about 5.5 million places nationally that accept Visa and MasterCard while only 3.8 million take American Express.
  • Have you signed up to receive a summary via e-mail of the Tuesday Report every week? If not, go to the top of this issue (right hand corner) and sign up!
  • Last week we reported on China opening its doors to the world’s retailers. Now they’re allowing foreign investors to own as much as 49% of entertainment programming ventures. (However, the ventures must use “China themes” in two-thirds of the programs.)
  • If you received a gift card over the holidays and don’t care for the store that it’s redeemable at, you might want to check out the secondary gift card market. SwapAGift.com lets recipients exchange their cards for cash or another gift card.
  • U.S. advertising spending for 2005 should rise 6.4% totaling about $280.6 billion, according to Robert J. Coen, Sr. VP of forecasting at Universal McCann media-services firm. Worldwide ad spending will total about $553.4 billion, a 6.1% jump over last year.
  • Product development is a high-stakes game. Desperate to increase sales and market share, companies are digging deeper into shoppers’ homes and habits to discover “unmet needs” and then design new products to meet them. Last year marketers launched a dizzying 34,000 new foods, drinks and beauty products! (Corporate barter companies are one of the outlets that manufacturers seek to handle their failed products.)
  • The World Trade Organization (WTO) reports that world-wide exports now account for 26.4% of world-wide production (GDP), compared with 8% in 1950. Global gross domestic product (GDP) has expanded some six-fold since 1950.
  • The cruise industry is booming, with more than 10 million people booking cruises last year. Meanwhile, the airline industry has five carriers (representing 20% of all U.S. airline seats) in bankruptcy court.

 



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? Copyright BarterNews 2005. Redistribution of BarterNews content expressly prohibited without the prior written permission of BarterNews.

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