Barter for Web Services

money 150x150 Barter for Web ServicesWe generally try to focus our advice towards beginner bloggers, but this one is for the more “seasoned” blogger.

Know what you’re worth!

There comes a point where your site is in limbo. You’ve risen to the top of the pack in your category. Or maybe you deserve to be on one of those “The Best ____ Blogs You’ve Never Heard Of.” However, you’re not quite making thousands of dollars a year.

So you’d like to keep blazing the trail, but you need some serious, professional services to get you there. Then again, you’re not exactly raking in the dough.

So what do you do? Barter.

Your site has pretty good traffic, right. Heck, it has great traffic and is growing every day!

See if your potential service providers will accept a barter arrangement. They provide certain technical services for you in exchange for advertising space on your blog. That way, no cash ever has to exchange hands.

In our case, iCast Limited takes on the occasional barter deal. We serve advertisements that we sell to other companies and serve them on our network of bartered sites. So we make money all year long off the ads, and our clients get reliable, professional technical services.

Everybody is happy, and you didn’t have to break the bank!

The Art of the Guest Post

Ever heard of a guest post?  If not, it may be one of your favorite ideas ever when it comes to keeping content on your site updated regularly.

In a nutshell, a guest post is when someone completely unrelated to your blog writes a post for you.  They aren’t pretending to be you or anything, but they are contributing.  It’s like a contributing editor or writer.

How do you get them?  Well hopefully, you’ve developed some relationships with other bloggers in your space.  You might reach out to them and offer them the chance to guest post on your site.  That might be all it takes.

You might first offer to provide them with a guest post written by you. Chances are they will run it.  Just make sure to write something that isn’t time sensitive.  In other words, write something they can stick in the “rainy day” folder, and break out when they need something in a pinch.

If you have a fairly good amount of traffic, you could just ask your readers to submit something.  Many of them are probably bloggers themselves and would be willing to do it.

The payoff for you is a little breathing room to take a break.  They are great to have on days you are not feeling the mojo.  They can also bring you outside readers that may click in from the author’s site…you never know.