Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

Some quick stats for April:

• TradeHolding.com B2B Network had its best month so far in its 5.5 year of existence, in terms of membership revenue, number of visits was also high
• OneLoveNet.com free dating service generated the biggest growth: number of new accounts, number of visitors, number of logins, revenue were all on top
• Launched Kugli.com Free Classifieds Site, growing very fast in terms of visitors, just check our Alexa ranking…
• Working hard to launch the Global Real Estate Listings Portal Mondinion.com, I prefer not to estimate the launch date, I don’t like to “guesstimate”…
• The number of servers we manage currently has grown to 7 in April… quite a lot, but I prefer to have fast loading pages.

On the other hand, the biggest challenge on all these UGC (user generated content) sites is fighting with scam and spam. It is fortunate that we already have embedded techniques and manual verification to fight scam and spam, however, as I wrote on earlier posts nothing can be perfect.

Yes, we are online but still in beta… Kugli.com, the free global and local classifieds website opened last week and we are now officially accepting classified ads for local communities.

There are already plenty of classified ads posted by visitors, what I like a lot is the extremely easy ad posting form, thanks to Ajax. There is no need for users to register, they can simply use a form to publish their ads. The biggest challenge so far is convincing users to post their ads, until the site looks empty very few persons will actually spend time to post an ad. But I am confident that in a few months my biggest challenge will be spam and scam fighting… although I already embedded some techniques to detect and eliminitate scam and spam, however nothing can be perfect.

What other features am I going to integrate? Just to mention the 2 most important things:

• member registration, login and ad tracking
• multilingual support.

Also, I have some other plans for marketing, but I will write about this sometime later.

Do you like Kugli.com? We welcome your links from your website and any suggestion.

Yes, I am close to launch www.kugli.com - Free Classified Ads website. I am still working on the scripting part but hopefully it will not take more than a few days to launch it. This is the first project where I use a lot of Ajax.

For the beginning Kugli.com will have 6 main categories:

• Real Estate Ads
• Cars & Vehicles
• Sell & Buy
• Services
• Pets & Animals
• Jobs & Resumes

I am eager to start it and compete with the big guys… So, kijiji and craigslist, be prepared, I am going to compete with you soon.

A new big internet sale:

“In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash…. AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched “17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008,” as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company’s international expansion strategy.”

Bebo is the 3rd largest social network in the US. and the number 1 in the UK.

The entire article about this deal on news.com.

Yes, just take a look at the top movies section at OneLoveNet.com Free Online Dating Site. What do we see? Titanic, Romance, Friends, Romantic, 4 clearly “romantic” tags from the Top 10 used sd preferred movies by Singles. It looks like we all need love and romatism…

Other popular movies preferred by singles: Action, Comedy, Prison Break, Lord of the Rings, Gladiator, Matrix. I do not have such statistics but I guess that Gladiator and Matrix are most probably preferred by the machos.

See the Full List of Top Movies here.

Based on the number of users on OneLoveNet.com, here is a list of the Top 25 most active dating cities:

Free Dating Dubai
Free Dating Bucuresti
Free Dating Mumbai
Free Dating Delhi
Free Dating Nairobi
Free Dating Chennai
Free Dating Kolkata
Free Dating Bangalore
Free Dating Karachi
Free Dating Hyderabad
Free Dating Lahore
Free Dating Pune
Free Dating New Delhi
Free Dating Abu Dhabi
Free Dating London
Free Dating Toronto
Free Dating Cairo
Free Dating Dhaka
Free Dating Islamabad
Free Dating Kampala
Free Dating Iasi
Free Dating Constanta
Free Dating New York
Free Dating Bucharest
Free Dating Coimbatore

So, what do we see here? The top is Dubai from UAE. The second position is occupied by Bucharest, the capital of my country. Considering the fact that when I launched OneLoveNet.com I promoted it aggressively in Romania, this might not be that relevant. Then on the top 10 there are many cities from India and Pakistan, countries with big populations. The best “western” cities are London from the UK and Toronto from Canada, positions 15 and 16. Then, on the Top 25 we also see cities from African countries like Kenya or Egypt and another big city from UAE, Abu Dhabi. The best US city is of course… New York. Good luck on finding your One Love on the Net!

Yes, it looks like we beat ourselves every month with TradeHolding.com B2B Network. In January, we announced a record number of visitors: 60,489 visitors in just one day. Well, February has been even better. We had 88,952 visitors in just one day: February 26. The next target is 100,000 visitors in just one day. Obviously the number of messages exchanged between our members is increasing as well and the number of new companies that join our network every day. And yes… our revenues are also growing month after month. Considering that I run this network mostly alone (with the help of a few devoted site-partners… and some technical and customer care help…), I think I can not complain… Some of my competition claim that they invested $20 million in a similar site… well I have to say that my investment was in a much much smaller scale… Not to mention the biggest player in the B2B Marketplace Alibaba.com, which was partly sold to Yahoo (I guess 40%) for $1 billion…

Our free dating site, OneLoveNet.com is also growing and things are looking very good here as well. Most of the free dating sites do not have limitations, and it looks like our kind of hybrid model is working very well and although spamming and scamming is still present on our sites, it is on a much smaller scale than on other free dating sites. Thanks to the community as well, our team of moderators are doing a great job. Want to join us? Just read more here.

Regarding our future plans, we will soon launch Mondinion.com, a Free Real Estate Property Ads & Listings website. The goal is to make this website the number 1 destination for international real estate and property classifieds where property owners (and real estate agents as well…) will be able to sell their homes, lands, houses, castles, etc. while international real estate investors will search for real estate ads that will be classified based on various criteria.

According to a survey published by Datran Media, 8 in 10 marketers cite email as the best-performing medium. Also, 82.4% of respondents stated, that they will increase their usage of email marketing. 63.5% of the respondents stated that they target based on demographics and / or geography.

Another interesting thing is that 81.2% of the respondents stated that they already use targeted email campaigns.

At TradeHolding.com B2B Network, we already have a feature for Targeted Mailing Campaigns, our members can send Targeted Selling offers or Buying requests based on selected keywords and / or regional filters. Our database is full of B2B Buyers and Sellers from all over the world, Members who stated what products and services are they regularly buying and selling. Want to try it out? Just login to your account at TradeHolding.com and send your Target Offer.

This is my first post in 2008, I have not been quite active lately (blogging)…

Couple of things happened this January (and not only):

• we bought a new server for TradeHolding.com B2B Network and put it into production
• launched www.chinatradeholding.com, a specialized website mainly focusing on Chinese Manufacturers, Chinese Wholesalers and Chinese Products; China is a big market and we thought we need tp have a site that is targeting the cheap Chinese B2B Market
• we generated a record revenue for December 2007, so far it looks like 2008 January will be even better
• added Internal Messaging between members
• yesterday (24 January, 2008) we get to another milestone: 60,489 visitors reached our network in just one day
• working hard on making the B2B Network more user friendly
• working on OneLoveNet.com free dating site as well, the installed Forum software might not be the best solution for us, at least we could not integrate it too well with our existing membership structure; the number of members looking for love is also growing day after day, our database now have more than 15,000 single profiles.

More news when I’ll have time.

Over the past five years, proudly left behind, 170,000+ companies joined TradeHolding.com B2B Network since 20 November, 2002. TradeHolding.com B2B Network is The Biggest Business to Business Network used everyday by thousands of buyers and sellers from all over the world.

On our 5th anniversary, we are proud that we reached a few more milestones. We had a record number of visitors (42,267 unique visitors) in November, and it looks like our traffic is growing every month.

Some other milestones:

• record number of contacts in October 2007
• record number of new Top Members in October 2007
• record number of revenue in October 2007. 

We are working extremely hard to keep a clean B2B Network and eliminate scam and fraud as much as it is possible. Our number one goal is customer satisfaction. We try to keep our premium service fees low (compared to our competition we are a lot more cheaper and I can say without any hesitation that some active free members are even getting better results than paid members at our competition….), but at the same time we try to offer the best services.

So, Thanks to all our Members and hopefully, we’ll all use (an even more improved) TradeHolding.com B2B Network at our 10th Anniversary as well!