In order for your small business to survive in such a competitive market you definitely need to incorporate a number of tactics within your business plan. Unfortunately, all too many small business owners have completely busted their budget because they thought this variety of marketing, advertising and small business tools were only available through expensive options. However, we’d like to remind you that the folks of medieval times got it right through their bartering tactics.

Just because you need an expensive small business tool or service to help keep your business running smoothly does not mean that you have to pay for it. No, we are not suggesting you start stealing or engaging in acts of online piracy. We’d like to remind you that as a small business owner you definitely have something of great value to offer to others. You’re in business for a reason, because you excel at a certain area. This means you have something to offer to another business in exchange for their product or service.

For example, we recently started to incorporate some more aggressive marketing campaigns that include backlinking (such as writing articles with links to our site and submitting them to article directories as well as planting links in blogs and forums that point back to our website). While we have a solid grasp of the concept and are quite capable of doing it ourselves, this endeavor starts to slip into areas that we will admit that we are not experts in. And since we practice what we preach, we decided to let others help us with areas that we are not experts in to help us concentrate on areas that we do excel at, allowing us to concentrate on our highest income producing activities; our copywriting service.

Therefore, we established a relationship with a link builder, offering our SEO article marketing services. We now write free articles for the link builder to use for their own work. In exchange, the link builder is now doing our link building for us, for free.

To help you take advantage of bartering for services, you should start by writing down your top five talents, abilities, services and products. This will help you establish exactly what you have to offer. Next, contact someone you know, or even reach out to a complete stranger, who specializes in the area that you need the most help with in order to increase sales. You have absolutely nothing to lose by suggesting this barter since you will not be investing any money in this process.

We hope you’ll take advantage of this small business budget advice. It’s one of the few chances to receive a virtual 100% ROI—it’s free to do!