January 18,
2005 Written
by Bob Meyer, Editor of BarterNews
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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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