Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

Long time since I last wrote to this blog. It is time to keep you up to date with what I am doing presently. I will post some of my comments from a press release that was released to public just a few days ago:

 ”We have big plans for 2009:
* we will launch regional real estate websites (Mondinion.com partner sites) where we will focus our efforts to sell properties in these regions, our short term plans are to launch region specific websites in Europe, Middle East, Caribbean and Australia
* we plan to translate Mondinion.com and all partner sites and make the content available in several langauges
* we will continue our advertising campaigns to keep and even increase the growth rate we currently have
* we plan to release monthly stats about what real estate and in what regions are our visitors searching
* and, we will launch a new feature that is not available in a large scale anywhere else in the international real estate market, let this be a surprise…”

The good news is that one of the above mentioned regional real estate listing websites has just been launched. It is RealEstatePropertyListings.eu and it is targetting European Real Estate owners and agents as well as overseas investors who are interested in European Properties. More regional partner sites will be launched in the near future.

TradeHolding.com B2B Network is in Alexa Top 100k since 2004, in fact we have many sites on TradeHolding.com B2B Network with a Top 50k Alexa ranking, or even Top 20k Alexa ranking.

Last month, in August 2008, 2 more websites we launched recently reached the Top 100k Alexa ranking:

• OneLoveNet.com Free Dating Site and
• Kugli.com Local Classified Ads website.

Also, Mondinion.com International Property Listings Portal, covering a more specific niche reached 300-500 uniques every day and more and more real estate for sale and real estate for rent listings are posted day after day.

Overall, this summer was very good in terms of traffic for all our websites, our Quantcast measured websites are close to 1 million uniques / month, a traffic that place our network to a ranking of 6658 among all Internet destinations: “Premier World Sites is a top 10,000 destination that reaches over 976K monthly people, of which 226K (23%) are in the U.S.”

I just launched our newest project: Mondinion.com real estate listings portal. Why this name Mondinion? Because:

1. I could not find any available domain name containing the terms “realestate” or “property”.

2. Instead of someverylongrealestateorpropertydomainname.com I preferred to use a name that we think is more brandable like Mondinion.com. I also registered Ragla.com at the same time, but finally decided that Mondinion.com is a better name for a real estate portal.

What is Mondinion.com? Based on our first page definition: “If you are looking for properties, real estate or other housing related ads and propery listings you came to the right place. is a real estate platform, an international real estate for sale or real estate for rent listings directory. Our free real estate for sale or rent directory and classifieds service can help you to sell your house, apartment, land, villa, castle or property and to find cheap US and International properties for sale.” Frankly, I can not explain it better. It will be basically a place where developers, owners and real estate agents will post their housing related listings while investors and home buyers will search and browse among the listings and if offer and demand is matched a deal will be closed. Simple as 1+1.

I tried to build an easy to browse & nice looking website… well, it is not nice looking yet… I am very bad in design, but I already work with a designer to make it more professional.

Mondinion.com Property Listings Website is affiliated with our other Classified Ads Website Kugli.com and whatever real estate ad you post on Kugli.com will also show up on Mondinion.com and vice versa.

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, 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.

Just a short summary of June so far, from my point of view:

• TradeHolding.com B2B Network traffic up to an average of 14,000 unique visitors / day
• OneLoveNet.com is now averaging 1,200 uniques / day, the site is in page 1 in search engines for many competitive terms
• Working hard on keeping both TradeHolding.com and OneLoveNet.com spam and scam free…
• The Romanian Internet Market received its first significant venture capital investment (10+ million Euro invested in 2 jobsites: www.bestjobs.ro and www.ejobs.ro), too bad these sites were the 2 biggest email spammers in 2000-2001… but anyway, congrats to the owners
• a new partner joined TradeHolding.com B2B Network: www.southafricab2b.co.za will mainly focus on South African market and hopefully our B2B Network will have a stronger presence in this region
• still working on the real estate portal, it will be launched soon!