Who wants to barter?

Dear All,

Looking at members websites I noticed that many of them look worthy of improvement or the writing is rather average and the lack of traffic is only surpassed by the steadily growing frustration of not getting anywhere. This can be hardly surprising since most of us are not good at everything.

Myself for example: I am good at researching subjects and bring them into a well-written form. Occasionally I have even creative and/or funny ideas. I can also hammer out a basic website but here is where I hit my limits.

I am not good at graphical design, some areas of marketing or the finer aspects of website building. Therefore, my website might just look alright with some good content but without traffic and, as a result, without income. What I really want is a professionally presented site with the right design and well-thought-out functionality to give my visitors the all-important great user experience. To illustrate this point here is a website I did as part of my boot camp training: www.opportunityforacademics.siterubix.com.

Spending weeks or months on a mediocre website sounds like a daft idea. Unfortunately, it seems that this is what many of us do.

What can we do about it?

Nobody is good at everything but we are all good at something.

So - let's trade and barter.

For example, I have an excellent idea/niche, research it well and write some genuine, good content. Now I need someone to give my idea the proper design, realised in a professional, functional and good looking website with the right marketing tools to succeed.

This is when 'Bob the Barterer' enters the scene and gives me a helping hand in designing and building the website. 'Philip the Mouth' in the meantime checks out my marketing approach (domain name, keywords, SEO etc) while 'Susie Quattro' has a look at the content and offers editing and improvement advise. The result will be a website with impact and the potential for growth and revenue.

In return, I will write some content for 'Bob', feed relevant information about his new niche to 'Philip' and do for 'Susie' website what she did for mine.

This way everybody wins.

In case 'Bob' doesn't need something written, 'Rosie Flamingo' might. So in true pay-it-forward fashion, we could earn 'credits' for doing a job for somebody else (very much like the review and comment section already works in SiteRubix).

I am aware that this proposal comes with a few problems. The biggest, in my opinion, is the valuing of jobs (what constitutes a job and how many credits is it worth?) and the level of consistent quality required. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned credits just to get a lousy design or a sub-standard article your cat could have written (I have this problem with my cat who thinks he is a great writer but most of the time I can't even read what he just smeared on the paper - he calls it calligraphy).

Bartering could be an informal network of able, dedicated members or, perhaps, it could be a new feature of the Wealthy Affiliate platform.

There has to be a monitoring system to keep matters fair to everybody. This could be achieved either through peer reviews (appointed fellow members check results and solve possible disputes) or it could be a general service, governed by Wealthy Affiliate.

At this point, I would like to see if there is any interest in the bartering concept out there. What do you think, dear reader and fellow member? What are you good at and what not?

Martin